Katherine Johnson Quotes

Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.

Katherine gave in to the wonder of the moment, imagining herself in the astronauts' place. What emotions welled up from the depths of their hearts as they regarded their watery blue home from the void of space? How did it feel to be separated by a nearly unimaginable gulf from the rest of humanity yet carry the hopes, dreams, and fears of their entire species there with them in their tiny, vulnerable craft? Most people she knew wouldn't have traded places with the astronauts for all of the gold in Fort Knox. The men existed all alone out their in the void of space, connected so tenuously to Earth, with the real possibility that something could go wrong. But given the chance to throw her lot in with the astronauts, Katherine Johnson would have packed her bags immediately. Even without the pressure of the space race, even without the mandate to beat the enemy. For Katherine Johnson, curiosity always bested fear.

I could not share Daphne’s passion for Bacon, while she was equally reticent about my love for Dr Johnson and Madame de Sévigné, but we had both fallen, at different times, under the spell of Katherine Mansfield.

But perhaps most important, Katherine Johnson’s story can be a doorway to the stories of all the other women, black and white, whose contributions have been overlooked. By recognizing the full complement of extraordinary ordinary women who have contributed to the success of NASA, we can change our understanding of their abilities from the exception to the rule. Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent.

her recommendation—Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, freshly annotated; Alice Munro’s Open Secrets; Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man; Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy—and the sight of each made her sigh.

Katherine Johnson’s passion for her work was as strong during the remainder of her thirty-three-year career at Langley as it was the first day she was drafted into the Flight Research Division. “I loved every single day of it,” she says. “There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work.” She considers her work on the lunar rendezvous, prescribing the precise time at which the lunar lander needed to leave the Moon’s surface in order to coincide and dock with the orbiting command service module, to be her greatest contribution to the space program.

It baffled me that so many students disliked math and struggled with it. I figured they had either a parent who didn’t like math and told them it was hard or a teacher who didn’t have the passion or the patience to make math relevant to their lives. At home I never let my girls tell me math or any other subject was difficult. From the time they were very young, I always tried to incorporate learning, whether it was math, spelling, or creative activities, such as sewing and working puzzles, into their lives. I tried to show them how what they were learning in school connected to our lives outside school. Of course, I had them counting everything—the stars in the sky, the steps from the bottom to the top of the Carson mansion, or the people in church on any given Sunday. On road trips I’d have them add the numbers on the license plates of cars traveling in front of us. Or I’d have them cover their eyes and spell the state. If they were helping in the kitchen, I might write out a recipe, give it to them, and ask them to figure out how much of each ingredient we would need if I wanted to make half of that batch of cookies or biscuits.

attenuate the city’s hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to mean to me. That day after church, we spent a long while catching up with the formidable Mrs. Land, who had been one of my favorite Sunday school teachers. Kathaleen Land, a retired NASA mathematician, still lived on her own well into her nineties and never missed a Sunday at church. We said our good-byes to her and clambered into the minivan, off to a family brunch. “A lot of the women around here, black and white, worked as computers,” my father said, glancing at Aran in the rearview mirror but addressing us both. “Kathryn Peddrew, Ophelia Taylor, Sue Wilder,” he said, ticking off a few more names. “And Katherine Johnson, who calculated the launch windows for the first astronauts.” The

To care about a changing climate we don’t have to be a tree-hugger or an environmentalist; as long as we are a human alive today, then who we already are, and what we already care about, gives us all the reasons we need. Katherine Hayhoe

It was intricate, but it was possible.

Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, named after the human computer who calculated trajectories virtually in her head for our earliest space flights

Katherine Johnson had given her best to her part of the grand puzzle, of that she was sure. The day was soon coming when the world would see if her best, if the brainy fellas’ best, if NASA’s best, was good enough.

Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography … especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent. - Katherine Mansfield

After the active ingredients are manufactured, the additional ingredients chosen, and the principal laboratory and clinical tests conducted, the formula then moves to the manufacturing floor to see if it can be made on a commercial scale. As the manufacturing runs become larger, the processes become harder to control. If something can go wrong, it will. You can build a fortress of current good manufacturing practices around the drug-making process and still “shit happens,” as Malik liked to say. Conscientious manufacturers try to protect against past disasters and prevent new ones. But because manufacturing plants are operated by humans, the systems will break down, no matter how perfectly designed they are. For example, Johnson & Johnson’s epilepsy drug was fine until the company stacked it on wooden pallets that likely leached solvents into the medicine. At Mylan’s Morgantown plant, one lab technician left a note for another stating that he had to “rig” a hose on the equipment to get it to work properly—a word choice that easily could have shut down the plant had an FDA investigator stumbled across it and suspected fraud instead of primitive problem-solving. The only remedy for this variability is for plants to adhere scrupulously to good manufacturing practices and create real-time records of each drug-making step. The resulting data serve as a blueprint for finding and fixing the inevitable errors, a process that FDA investigators scrutinize. How well and how closely did the company investigate itself? The goal is to address a problem “in a way that it never happens again,” as Malik explained.

The Housing Rights Act of 1968, making it illegal to discriminate in the housing industry based on race, had lingered in Congress for years, vehemently opposed by legislators both in the North and the South. The bill only made it over the finish line in the wake of the 1968 assassination of Dr. King. Katherine Johnson certainly knew all about the housing issue.

Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations. Instead of sending her numbers to be checked by the computer, Katherine now worked in reverse, running the same simulation inputs that the computer received through her calculator, hoping that there would be “very good agreement” between her answers and the 7090s’, just as had been the case when she originally ran the numbers for the Azimuth Angle report. She worked through every minute of what was programmed to be a three-orbit mission, coming up with numbers for eleven different output variables, each computed to eight significant digits. It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work. At the end of the task, every number in the stack of papers she produced matched the computer’s output; the computer’s wit matched hers. The pressure might have buckled a lesser individual, but no one was more up to the task than Katherine Johnson.

Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden loved math. As children, they showed special skill in arithmetic, and they went on to study mathematics in college. After graduation they worked as teachers before going to work as “computers,” or mathematicians, for the government’s air and space program.