Imagine for a second that you are an astronaut.
Right. And you are about to be strapped into
this tiny metal cylinder sitting on top of thousands
of pounds of highly explosive rocket fuel. Sounds
terrifying. Oh, totally. And you are trusting
your life. and really the future of your entire
country's space program, to the very first generation
of electronic computers. Yeah, these massive
machines that fill entire rooms. Exactly. They're
cutting edge, but they are completely untested
in this kind of life or death scenario. So you
look at the mission directors, the people who
have spent millions of dollars on these digital
brains, and you tell them, absolutely not. You
just refuse. Right. You refuse to launch until
one specific human being double checks the machine's
math. It's honestly one of the most stunning
visuals in modern history. I mean, when you really
think about it, you have the absolute peak of
human technological advancement, like the literal
dawn of the digital age. paused, stuck on the
launch pad. Yeah. And the entire apparatus is
waiting for a single person with the pencil and
a mechanical calculating machine to give the
green light. Well, today's deep dive is all about
that exact person. We are pulling from a comprehensive,
historical and biographical source, chronicling
the incredible 101 year life of Crayola Catherine
Johnson. It is such an amazing story. It really
is. And our mission today is to figure out exactly
how a brilliant mathematician from West Virginia
bypassed pretty much insurmountable barriers
of race and gender to become the ultimate human
safety net for America's journey to the stars.
Okay, let's unpack this. We have to start at
the beginning, I think, because her early life
really establishes the sheer velocity of her
intellect. Oh, absolutely. So she was born in
1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
Her mother was a teacher, and her father was
this true polymath of his era. I mean, he was
a lumber man, a farmer, a handyman, and he worked
at the Greenbrier Hotel. Wow. So he was doing
a bit of everything. Yeah, exactly. And from
a very early age, she demonstrated this intense,
almost a gravitational pull toward mathematics.
She counted everything. Like what? Like the steps
of the road, the steps to church, the number
of dishes she washed. If it could be counted,
she counted it. That's wild. But her intellect
immediately collided with this massive systemic
wall. Right, the segregation laws. Yeah. In her
county, public schooling for black students simply
stopped after the eighth grade. The local government
had basically decided that was the absolute limit
of the educational infrastructure they were going
to provide. If she wanted to keep learning, she
was completely on her own. But her family just
refused to accept that dead end. They essentially
engineered a dual life for themselves. How so?
Well, during the school year, her parents would
move the family 120 miles away to Institute West
Virginia. That's a huge commitment. It really
was. And they did this specifically so Katherine
could attend a high school situated right on
the campus of West Virginia State College. And
she was only 10 years old at the time. 10 years
old? Yeah. 10 years old and just walking around
a college campus to take high school classes.
I mean, think about the kids you know today at
10 years old. Right. They're navigating, what,
fifth grade? Yeah, maybe fifth grade. And imagine
them packing up their lives to tackle an advanced
high school curriculum. It's like she was speed
running a video game on the hardest possible
difficulty setting. She wasn't just excelling.
She was forcing the world around her. to warp
to her abilities. That's a great way to put it.
Because she graduates high school at 14, she
graduates college at 18, summa cum laude, no
less, with degrees in both mathematics and French.
And her progression there highlights something
really crucial about the nature of genius, I
think, which is that talent is universal, but
opportunity is not. Right. She needed the right
environment to flourish. And she found it in
mentors like chemist Angie Turner King and WWC
Flynn Clader. And Clader is a huge figure in
this story. Oh, absolutely. He was only the third
African -American to ever receive a doctorate
in mathematics. And when Catherine just blew
through the existing college curriculum, Clader
literally invented new math courses just for
her. I want to pause on that for a second, because
what does it actually mean to invent new math
courses? I mean, we aren't talking about giving
your extra homework sheets. No, no, not at all.
We are talking about moving way past standards.
textbook calculations and into advanced theoretical
problem solving. Clader was teaching her analytic
geometry. Which is what, exactly? It's essentially
the synthesis of algebraic equations and geometric
shapes. So instead of just drawing a curve on
a page, you are using complex equations to define
every single microscopic point on that curve.
Oh, wow. Yeah, he was training her brain to map
physical space using raw numbers. He recognized
very early on that she had the specific cognitive
architecture required to be a high -level research
mathematician. And that cognitive architecture
puts her right in the crosshairs of history.
Because after she spent some time teaching, she
is selected to integrate the graduate mathematics
program at West Virginia University in Morgantown.
Right, this is in 1939. Yeah, and this happens
right in the wake of the 1938 Supreme Court ruling
Missouri XREL, Gaines v. Canada. What's fascinating
here is how that Supreme Court ruling acted as
a catalyst, right? But it was Johnson's undeniable
brilliance that made her the prime candidate
to actually break that specific ceiling. Because
the ruling didn't just automatically fix things.
Exactly. The ruling basically mandated that states
either provide separate, equal higher education
for Black students, or admit them to white universities.
So her college president handpicked her to be
one of only three African -American students
and the only woman to integrate WVU's graduate
math program. Which places just a staggering
amount of cultural and political pressure on
a young woman who, at the end of the day, really
just wants to solve equations. Yeah, the weight
of that must have been immense. Ultimately, she
pauses that graduate program after the first
session to start a family with her first husband,
James Goble, and she goes back to teaching. But,
you know, you read through the sources and you
get the distinct feeling that a mind operating
at her level just couldn't stay hidden in a classroom
forever. No, definitely not. The world was about
to demand her specific set of skills. Because
the entire geopolitical landscape was shifting
drastically. The Cold War escalated, and the
sudden explosion of aerospace research created
this insatiable demand for sheer brain power.
Right. They just needed people who could do the
math. Exactly. The walls of institutional segregation
began to crack, honestly, simply out of mathematical
necessity. They needed the brain power, and they
needed it immediately. And that brings us to
1952. A relative mentions that the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics, which is NACA, the
precursor to NASA, is hiring for its West Area
computing section in Hampton, Virginia. Yeah.
So by the summer of 1953, she takes the job,
she moves her family to Newport News, and she
walks into a pool of women famously referred
to as computers who wore skirts. And it is so
important for us to remember that at this time,
computer was a job title. It wasn't machine.
Right. It was a person doing the computing. Yeah.
Imagine trying to design an airplane wing today.
You would just use software, right? But in 1953,
a test plane would fly, and instruments inside
a black box would record data on photographic
film. The human computers had to read that film,
frame by frame. And then they'd use slide rules
and mechanical desk calculators to plot the exact
aerodynamic forces acting on the plane. That
sounds incredibly tedious. It was grueling. It
was hyper -precise manual mathematics. And Katherine
Johnson was incre - I mean, so good, in fact,
that she and a colleague were temporarily assigned
to an all -male flight research team. Because
of that analytic geometry background. Exactly.
Her deep understanding of that geometry made
her indispensable. She later joked that they,
quote, forgot to return me to the pool. Which
is pretty funny. It is. But while the math was
elegant, the environment she was working in was
incredibly harsh. This is Virginia in the 1950s.
She's required to work, eat, and use the restrooms
in segregated facilities. Her office literally
had a sign on the door that read colored computers.
Yeah. The juxtaposition between the cutting edge
science they were doing and the archaic social
structure of the time is just glaring. It really
is. And yet she later said something about this
that I really want your take on. When asked about
the segregation, she said, I didn't feel any
segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn't
feel it. She talked about how everyone was intensely
focused on the research and they played bridge
together at lunch. And it just didn't impact
her. How does a person walk past a colored computer
sign every morning and claim they didn't feel
it? Well, I think it speaks to a profound psychological
defense mechanism, but also to the great equalizer
of mathematics itself. What do you mean by that?
Think about it. When you are calculating the
physics of flight, the math is entirely objective.
The numbers do not care about your race, your
gender, or the Jim Crow laws of 1950s Virginia.
Right, 2 plus 2 is 4 no matter what room you're
in. Exactly. By pouring her entire consciousness
into the undeniable truth of the equations, she
carved out the psychological sanctuary for herself.
She operated in a realm where her intellect was
the only variable that mattered. Engaging with
the indignity of those signs wasn't going to
solve the aerodynamic problem sitting on her
desk. She simply refused to let their prejudices
distract her from her work. And that quiet confidence
bred this incredible assertiveness in her. I
mean, she started asking to attend the editorial
meetings where the engineers discussed the research.
And up until then, no woman had ever been allowed
in those rooms. But she didn't ask for permission.
She asked for logical consistency. I love that.
She basically told them, look, I have done the
calculations. I understand the data better than
anyone. And therefore, my presence in this room
is scientifically necessary. And what could they
even say to that? Nothing. The engineers, confronted
with that undeniable logic, eventually just let
her in. Which sets up one of my absolute favorite
moments in this entire source material. The Skopinski
Report. Oh, this is a great story. At this time,
women were categorically barred from putting
their names on research reports. Their labor
was just meant to be invisible. But Johnson was
doing the heavy lifting on this highly complex
report regarding azimuth angles for placing satellites
over specific Earth positions. Let's clarify
what an azimuth angle is real quick because it
really highlights the complexity of her work
here. Yeah, please do. So if you want to put
a satellite in orbit so it passes over a specific
city at a specific exact time, you can't just
shoot the rocket straight up. Because the Earth
is spinning. Exactly. The Earth is a spinning
sphere and the satellite will be orbiting in
three dimensions. The azimuth angle is the exact
compass direction you need to launch the rocket
so its trajectory perfectly aligns with the spinning
planet down below. And she is doing this mind
-bending spherical geometry by hand. By hand,
yes. So she's working with a male engineer, Ted
Skopinski, and their supervisor, Henry Pearson,
who the source dryly notes was not a fan of women.
He is pushing to get this report finished so
Skopinski can transfer out to Houston. But Skopinski
knows the reality of the situation, so he pushes
back against the supervisor. He says, Catherine
should finish the report. She's done most of
the work anyway. It's like the ultimate mic drop.
It's like being a ghostwriter who finally forces
the publisher to put your name on the cover of
the bestseller. That's exactly what it is. The
supervisor had no counter -argument. Pearson
was forced to let her finish it, and Katherine
Johnson became the first woman in her division
to have her name printed on a research report.
And this is a massive structural victory. By
forcing her name onto the permanent historical
record, she destroyed the illusion that women
were merely human calculators. She proved they
were authors of the aerospace research itself.
And getting her name on that report was merely
the prologue. Because soon, NACI transitions
into NASA and the stakes just skyrocket. We move
from testing airplane gusts to launching human
beings into the vacuum of space. And here's where
it gets really interesting. Because the mathematics
go from being theoretical aerodynamic research
to being the only thread keeping an astronaut
alive. Right. We enter the Mercury program. In
1961, Alan Shepard becomes the first American
in space. And Katherine Johnson was the one who
calculated his trajectory and his exact launch
window. And to put that in perspective for you
listening, calculating a launch window isn't
like looking at a train schedule. You are trying
to hit a moving target from a spinning planet
through a varying atmosphere using a vehicle
that is essentially a controlled explosion. It's
unfathomably complicated. If you launch three
minutes late, The planet has rotated, the orbital
mechanics have shifted, and the astronaut misses
the target area entirely. Exactly, but her calculations
were so flawless that Shepard's Freedom 7 capsule
was found immediately after splashdown. Wow.
But her contribution wasn't just the primary
path. She also plotted detailed backup navigation
charts for the astronauts just in case of a sudden
electronic failure. She was always planning for
the worst case scenario. Which brings us to 1962
and the legendary John Glenn story. NASA has
finally installed these massive, room -sized
IBM electronic digital computers. They can process
calculations at speeds humans just can't even
comprehend. Right, the cutting edge of tech.
Yeah, and they're supposed to calculate the orbital
equations that will allow John Glenn to circle
the Earth. But Glenn looks at the machines and
balks. He tells the engineers to get the girl.
He completely refuses to fly unless Katherine
Johnson personally rechecks the machine's numbers.
And this raises a really important question about
the nature of trust in engineering. If you just
spent millions of dollars on the most advanced
calculating machine in human history, why do
you trust a human brain more? Right. I mean,
it seems completely counterintuitive to us today
when we trust our smartphones to navigate us
literally everywhere without a second thought.
You really have to look at it from John Glenn's
perspective. The electronic computer was a black
box. It was prone to hiccups, power fluctuations,
random glitches. It could spit out an answer,
but it couldn't explain how it got there. It
didn't show its work. Exactly. Katherine Johnson,
however, was totally transparent. Glenn knew
that she understood the fundamental architecture
of the mathematics. If she arrived at the exact
same numbers as the computer, it meant the computer's
process was sound. She wasn't just checking the
math, really. She was verifying the machine's
sanity. The irony there is beautiful. Her sheer
human brilliance was used to legitimize the very
digital technology that would eventually render
human computers obsolete. She was basically the
bridge between the analog and the digital ages.
And her reputation for absolute accuracy became
the gold standard at NASA. She went on to help
calculate the projectory for the 1969 Apollo
11 flight to the moon. That's incredible. Yeah,
while Neil Armstrong was taking those first steps,
she was at a meeting in the Pocono Mountains
crowded around this tiny television screen watching
the combination of her life's work. But the moment
that truly defines her value to the space program
I think happens a year later during Apollo 13
in 1970. The mission famously aborts after an
oxygen tank explodes. The crew is stranded halfway
to the moon. It's a total disaster. They are
losing power, systems are failing, and their
electronic navigation is dead. They have to navigate
back to Earth manually. And what saves them?
Katherine Johnson's backup procedures. Specifically,
her work on the one -star observation system.
The one -star observation system is just a stroke
of absolute genius. When a spacecraft loses power,
it loses its digital horizon. Meaning they don't
know up from down? Exactly. The astronauts have
no idea which way is up, down, or toward Earth.
But Johnson had helped design a system where
an astronaut could look through the window, find
one specific known star, and use it as a fixed
anchor point. Just one star. Just one star. By
measuring the angle of that single star at a
specific time, they could use spherical trigonometry
to calculate the exact orientation of the spacecraft
in three -dimensional space. It is a celestial
compass. It is breathtaking to think about. In
a later interview, she said something so poignant
about that time. She said, everybody was concerned
about them getting there. We were concerned about
them getting back. That encapsulates her entire
philosophy. The engineers were focused on the
glory of the launch, but she was focused on the
absolute certainty of the return. When disaster
strikes, it's not the flashy cutting edge technology
that saves the day. It's the quiet foundational,
tedious preparation, the backup charts, the analog
contingencies that actually brings people home
alive. And yet... Despite being the architect
of these life -saving systems, society took decades
to truly recognize her. It really did. She stayed
at NASA for a long, quiet career, eventually
retiring in 1986. She worked on the space shuttle
program, the Earth resources satellite. She even
drafted early mathematical models for a human
mission to Mars. Wow. Over her career, she co
-authored 26 scientific papers. She also lived
a remarkably full personal life. She was married
to his second husband, Jim Johnson, who was an
army officer and a Korean War veteran for 60
years. 60 years. Yeah. She was three daughters,
had six grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.
She lived to be 101 years old, passing away in
2020. And she spent her later years endlessly
encouraging young students to enter STEM fields.
But the massive public recognition. The awards,
they didn't really start pouring in until she
was almost 100 years old. It was this massive
avalanche of delayed recognition. In 2015, President
Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, and he specifically pointed out that
she refused to be limited by society's expectations
of her gender and race. Then you get the 2016
film. Hidden Figures, where she's portrayed by
Toraji P. Henson. She goes to the Oscars in a
wheelchair and receives this massive standing
ovation from the entire world. Suddenly, NASA
opens a 40 ,000 square foot Katherine G. Johnson
computational research facility at Langley. Northrop
Grumman names a spacecraft the SS Katherine Johnson.
There is a GPS satellite bearing her name. Elementary
and middle schools are renamed in her honor.
Mattel even makes a Barbie doll in her likeness.
It's wild how fast it all happened at the end.
It is. So what does this all mean? I mean, why
did it take half a century for the world to realize
who built the math that took us to the moon?
It's almost as if society found a winning lottery
ticket in the couch cushions 50 years after the
drawing and finally decided to cash it in. Well,
if we connect this to the bigger picture, these
late in life awards aren't just about honoring
one woman. They are a massive societal effort
to correct a deeply flawed historical record.
How so? Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of the
book Hidden Figures, which was a primary source
for much of her biographical data points, had
a crucial bias in how we value labor. For decades,
computing was viewed as women's work. And because
it was done by women, the male -dominated engineering
establishment viewed it as secretarial. Hostiting
numbers. Exactly. They believed the hardware
design was the real work, and the math was just
data entry. Even though the hardware literally
cannot fly without the math telling it where
to go. Precisely. It took the distance of history
to give us the perspective to see how absolutely
foundational her labor truly was. Katherine Johnson
wasn't just doing the math for the engineers.
She was the architect of the reality they were
trying to build. Without her mapping the geometry
of space, the rockets are just very expensive
fireworks. It fundamentally changes the way you
look at major achievements. When we zoom out
and look at her whole journey, it is just staggering.
You have a 10 -year -old girl forced by the absolute
worst of systemic barriers to travel across the
just to attend high school. Yeah. And she grows
up to map the path to the moon. And she does
it not through loud theatrical rebellion but
through relentless undeniable competence by simply
insisting day after day that she belonged in
the room where the math was being done. Her legacy
proves that the most critical work in any massive
human endeavor is almost always being done quietly.
It's the backup charts. It's the triple checked
math. It's the labor done without the expectation
of initial glory. She established the absolute
standard for human verification. Which brings
us right back to where we started. That astronaut,
John Glenn, sitting in the capsule, refusing
to trust the machine until Katherine Johnson
checked the math. And I think this raises an
important question and leaves us with a critical
thought for today. What's that? Well, Katherine
Johnson was the human verifier for the very first
generation of artificial intelligence and digital
computers. Right. Today, you and I are rushing
headlong into an era where we hand over our driving,
our medical diagnoses, our financial systems,
and our major societal decisions to complex algorithms
and AI black boxes. Yeah, we just trust them
blindly. We do. We don't really know how the
machines are getting their answers anymore. So
as you look around at our modern world, have
to ask yourself, who are the invisible Katherine
Johnsons of our current era? Who is doing the
math in the background, insisting on seeing the
data, and ensuring that the machines don't lead
us into the dark? Because right now, society
is strapping itself into the rocket, and someone
needs to be checking the math.