PSSA Practice Test 15

The Woman Who Checked the Numbers

¹Katherine Johnson loved numbers from the time she was a little girl. Growing up in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, she counted everything she could: the steps on the way to church, the dishes she washed, the forks and spoons she put away.

²Her teachers could see that she had a head for numbers. She was so quick at math that she moved ahead of other students her age. She finished high school at 14 and graduated from West Virginia State College at 18 with degrees in mathematics and French.

³A Job Computing For several years, Johnson worked as a teacher. Then, in 1953, she took a job at a government research center in Hampton, Virginia, part of the agency that would later become NASA. She joined a group of Black women mathematicians known as "computers." Before electronic computers were common, people called computers did the long, careful calculations that engineers needed. At that time, Black and white workers at the center were kept apart in offices and cafeterias.

⁴The computers worked with pencils, paper, and simple adding machines. A single problem could fill many pages and take days to finish. One small mistake could throw off every number that came after it, so the women checked and rechecked their work.

⁵Johnson was not content to just follow directions. She asked questions. She wanted to know why the engineers needed each number. She asked to go to the engineers' meetings, which women had not attended before, and in time she was allowed in. Soon she was working with a team that studied the paths of flights.

⁶Into Space In 1961, Johnson worked out the path for the flight of the first American to travel into space. The next year, NASA prepared to send astronaut John Glenn all the way around Earth. By then, NASA used electronic computers for the math. But the machines were new, and Glenn did not fully trust them. Before his flight, he asked for Johnson to check the computer's numbers by hand. Johnson spent days working through the calculations. Her numbers matched, and Glenn's 1962 flight was a success.

⁷Johnson went on to help work out the flight paths for the Apollo missions, including the 1969 mission that landed the first astronauts on the moon. She retired in 1986 after 33 years of work.

⁸Honored at Last For many years, few people outside NASA knew Johnson's name. That changed late in her life. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the highest honors the United States gives. A book and a movie, both called Hidden Figures, told the story of Johnson and her coworkers. NASA even named a research building after her.

⁹Katherine Johnson died in 2020 at the age of 101. She often said that she loved going to work every day. Her careful work helped carry astronauts safely into space and home again. It all began with a girl in West Virginia who could not stop counting the forks and spoons.