Katherine Johnson obituary
It was not the most arresting of titles: in 1959 the African-American mathematician Katherine Johnson, who has died aged 101, completed a paper entitled Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position. Thus did she become the first woman to have a credit on a report published by the flight research division of the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).
Even more significantly, those calculations were at the basis of a crucial part of Johnson's work for the astronaut John Glenn, when, in 1962, he became the first American to orbit the Earth. "Get the girl," the astronaut had said, refusing to fly unless Johnson, with her mastery of mathematics, had verified the computer's work on her mechanical calculating machine. "If she says they're good, then I'm ready to go." She did, and he flew.
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