Mathematics => 'Human computer'.

Katherine Johnson was a mathematician and ‘human computer’ at NASA, whose precise calculations were critical for the first American manned spaceflight and the Apollo moon landing.

Early on it was clear Johnson was a gifted child. Born in West Virginia in 1918, she enrolled directly into the second grade when she reached school age, and by age 10 she was ready for high school. She was one of the first Black students integrated into West Virginia’s graduate schools. At the young age of 18, Johnson graduated summa cum laude with degrees in both mathematics and French.

More than 75 years later Johnson received an honorary doctorate degree from West Virginia University. According to the institution, Johnson earned the honor by “attaining national and international preeminence in the field of astrophysics and providing distinguished leadership and service in her field.”

In the mid-1950s, NASA (then known as NACA) was looking into sending people to space for the first time —a task that required crunching a lot of numbers. Without the high-powered computers we have at our disposal today, the agency hired a team of women ‘computers’ to do the complex math for low wages. Johnson was interested, but the first time she applied for the job there were no positions left for her. She applied a second time the following year and made it in, soon becoming the NASA’s best ‘human computer’.

She was so skilled at her work as a ‘human computer’ that astronaut John Glenn personally requested that she verify the calculations for his orbital flight in 1962, saying he wouldn’t fly unless she checked the computer’s work by hand.

Later in her career at NASA, Johnson worked on some of the agency’s early plans for a mission to Mars. She retired in 1986, decades before NASA would release a detailed plan for reaching the Red Planet to the public.

She died in 2020 at the age of 101.