Katherine Jonson, winner of the presidential medial of freedom, refused to be limited by society5 expectations of her gender and race while expanding the borders of humanity's reach--President Barack Obama, 2015.
Using little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101, calculated the precise path that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong's history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth Wet throughout Mrs. Johnson's 33 years in NASA's Flight Research Division and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name. She was just one of thoseunheraldedwomen who, well before the modem feminist (女权) movement, worked as NASA mathematicians. But it was not only her gender that kept her long marginalized and long unsung Katherine Johnson, a West Virginia native, was also African-American.
But over time, the work of Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues--countless calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, chart paper and inefficient desktop calculating machines--won them a level of acceptance that for the most competitive race.
“NASA was a very professional organization, "Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. "They didn't have time to be concerned about what color I was." Nor, she said, did she. "I don't have a feeling of inferiority, "Mrs. Johnson said on at least one occasion. "Never had. I'm as good as anybody, but no better. "
To the end of her life, Mrs. Johnson refused praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home. "I was just doing my job, "Mrs. Johnson repeatedly said so. But what a job it was--done, no less, by a woman born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 35 than even finish high school.
