Add to that her gender, at a time when women weren’t credited with much competence for anything beyond home building and raising children, and you get the picture that she was no ordinary NASA mathematician. Her memoir dwells on the things she loved – mathematics, family and the supportive communities around her – but doesn’t shy away from details of the relentless cruelty, violence and injustice of racial segregation and prejudice that steeped the lives of her family and friends, and those of African American people in general. Few, if any, of the other mathematicians who worked with Johnson at NASA during the space race share that kind of mainstream fame, but neither were they forced to overcome the kind of barriers Johnson faced. Her autobiography, written with input from two of her three daughters, Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore, charts how she got there. “How could I have imagined,” writes Johnson, in the introduction to her autobiography My Remarkable Journey, “that from ages 97 to 101 I would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (with a kiss from my favorite president) appear onstage at the Oscars receive thirteen honorary doctorate degrees, including one from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa have four major buildings named in my honor, including a second NASA facility…” All that changed in 2016 following the success of Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling book Hidden Figures and the subsequent film adaptation. Yet until a few years ago, not many people had heard of Katherine Johnson and her pioneering work as a mathematician at NASA during the space race. IT IS rare to suddenly find yourself a household name at the age of 98.
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