They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them. With little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday, calculated (计算) the precise track that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong's history—making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.
Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson's 33 years in NASA and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name. Mrs. Johnson was one of several hundred educated, capable but largely unrecognized women who well before the modern feminist (女权) movement, worked as NASA mathematicians. But it was not only her sex that kept her long unsung. For some years at mid-century, the black women were forced to a double segregation ( 隔离): They were kept separate from the much large group of white women who in turn were segregated from the agency's male mathematicians and engineers.
Mrs. Johnson broke barriers at NASA. In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of black women who served as mathematicians for the space agency. Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film "Hidden Figures," which was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture.
In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her honor. That year, The Washington Post described her as "the most high - profile of the computers" — "computers " being the term originally used to describe Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues, much as "typewriters" were used in the 19th century to represent professional typists.
"She helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space," NASA's administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said in a statement on Monday, "even as she made huge steps that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human quest to explore space."
As Mrs. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure (任期) at Langley — from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 — was "a time when computers wore skirts."