On August 2, 1932, Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, into a family that moved to Institute so their mathematically gifted daughter could attend school past sixth grade. The county where she was born did not offer education for Black children beyond that level.

Johnson enrolled at West Virginia State College at fifteen. She graduated summa cum laude at eighteen with degrees in mathematics and French. Her graduate advisor, the mathematician W.W. Schieffelin Claytor, created new courses specifically for her because she had exhausted the existing ones. In 1953 she was hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — later NASA — as one of its "human computers," the Black women whose job was to check the calculations produced by white mathematicians.

She was better at it than they were.

By 1960, Johnson was co-authoring technical reports under her own name — a right she had to explicitly request, as women had not previously been given authorship credit. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 Freedom 7 mission, the first American human spaceflight. For John Glenn's 1962 orbital mission, Glenn refused to enter the capsule until Johnson personally verified the output of the IBM electronic computer. "If she says they're good," he told NASA, "then I'm ready to go."

She calculated the trajectory for the Apollo 11 moon landing. She worked on the Space Shuttle. After the Apollo 13 emergency, she helped plot the emergency return path that brought the crew home safely. She worked at NASA for thirty-three years.

None of this was public knowledge until the 2016 publication of Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures and the film adaptation. Johnson was ninety-seven years old when the film was released. She lived to see herself portrayed on screen, to have a NASA building named for her, to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died in 2020 at 101.

The question Shetterly's research raised — how many other Black women's mathematical contributions had been absorbed into the institutional record under male or white names — has no complete answer. The record was not designed to preserve their names.