Lesson 3 Beyond Barriers
Katherine Johnson, a “Computer” Who Looked Beyond Numbers
Katherine Johnson was ____ on August 26, 1918, in West Virginia, in the U.S., and was the youngest of four children in a black family.
____ was a math prodigy from early childhood.
Reflecting on her ____, Katherine once said, “I counted everything—the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes, spoons, and forks I washed.”
She excitedly added, “I couldn’t wait to get to high school to take ____ and geometry.”
But ____ hometown had a segregated education system, and black students could not enter high school.
So her father moved the family 200 kilometers away so that she could enter ____ school.
After ____ from high school in 1932, she was admitted to a black college at the age of fifteen.
By her ____ year, she had taken all the math courses the college could offer.
Her mentor gladly offered ____ classes just for her, but he was not happy when he had to tell his outstanding student about her career opportunities.
“You would make a good research mathematician,” he told his seventeen-year-old student, “and I’m going to ____ you for this career.”
Katherine asked, “Where will I find a job?”
“That,” he replied, “will be your ____.”
The path ahead was unclear and full of ____, but Katherine knew she had the strength to make her own way.
In ____, at the age of eighteen, Katherine graduated from college with highest honors and began her career as a teacher at a black public school.
At that time, teaching was the only ____ available to her.
It was not until 1953 that Katherine found a job at a NASA field ____ in Virginia.
There, she worked as one of the “Black computers” who did complex calculations manually to support white ____ engineers.
Though they greatly contributed to the space project, they endured a lot of discrimination, including segregation in the office and being referred to with terms like “girl” despite being professional ____.
Two weeks into the ____, Katherine was reassigned to NASA’s elite space research division.
There, she was the only ____ female member of the staff.
Despite her enormous contributions,
Despite her enormous contributions, the important research meetings were held only ____ white staff members.
When she asked for permission to attend the meetings, her ____ colleagues said that “the girls” didn’t usually go.
Katherine asked, “Is there a ____ that says I can’t go?”
The ____ male workers had no choice but to let her in.
By asking questions no one had ever ____, Katherine ended a discriminatory custom.
She had faced barriers, but her efforts to overcome them ____ off.
She felt proud and ____ her work with courage.
In 1960, she wrote a research ____ with another engineer about how to place a spacecraft into orbit.
That was the first ____ a woman in her division received credit as an author of a research report.
Katherine’s remarkable calculations by hand were trusted ____ than digital computers.
In early 1962,
In early 1962, John Glenn, one of the pioneering American astronauts, was preparing to ____ the Earth for the first time in American history.
NASA used an electronic computer, first introduced into the space program a year earlier, to calculate the ____ trajectory, but it made many minor errors.
Glenn, who was concerned about its accuracy, asked Katherine ____ to double-check the machine’s figures by hand.
“If she ____ the numbers are good,” he said, “I’m good to go.”
Using only a pencil and a slide rule, Katherine spent a day and a half checking the calculations and finally ____ sure of them.
____, Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.
Katherine was also part of the team that performed calculations for Apollo 11, which sent the first three men to the Moon in 1969, and even the plan to put people on Mars, which is still being ____ on today.
Katherine retired in 1986 after thirty-three years at ____.
After that, she dedicated the rest of her ____ to championing access to STEM education for Black girls.
For her contributions, President Barack Obama ____ her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and said,
“Katherine G. Johnson refused to be ____ by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.”
In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her ____ in Virginia and named it the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility.
She died on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101, but her pioneering legacy will ____ be forgotten.