“We needed to be assertive as women in those days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were.”
Katherine was an African American physicist and mathematician. She was 1 of the first 3 black people allowed to study at West Virginia University, which before that was an officially racist University. She was known for her work on the United States’ aeronautics and space programs where she worked with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. She made it possible for many space flights such as Project Mercury, including the early NASA missions of John Glenn and Alan Shepard, and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, through the Space Shuttle program to happen. Her calculations were critical to the success of these missions.
