Johnson's work included calculating trajectories, launch windows , and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those for astronauts Alan Shepard , the first American in space, and John Glenn , the first American in orbit, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on flights to the Moon. She was known as a "human computer" for her tremendous mathematical capability and ability to work with space trajectories with such little technology and recognition at the time.
She was portrayed by Taraji P. Henson as a lead character in the film Hidden Figures. He also worked at the Greenbrier Hotel. Johnson showed strong mathematical abilities from an early age. Because Greenbrier County did not offer public schooling for African-American students past the eighth grade, the Colemans arranged for their children to attend high school in Institute, West Virginia.
After graduating from high school at the age of 14, Johnson matriculated at WVSC, a historically black college. Several professors mentored her, including the chemist and mathematician Angie Turner King , who had guided Coleman throughout high school, and W.
Schieffelin Claytor , the third African-American to receive a doctorate in mathematics. Claytor added new mathematics courses just for Johnson. In , after marrying her first husband, James Goble, she left her teaching job and enrolled in a graduate mathematics program. She quit at the end of the first session and chose to focus on her family life. Davis , she became one of three African-American students, [ 16 ] and the only woman, selected to integrate the graduate school after the United States Supreme Court ruling in Missouri ex rel.
Gaines v. Canada required States which provided public higher education to white students to provide it to black students as well, either by establishing black colleges and universities or by admitting black students to previously white-only universities.
