Assuming you follow the tech news in one way or another you know that 2015 hasn’t been a kind year to women in tech.

Although it didn’t start this year, trolling, bullying, trashing, violence and death threats have become almost everyday occurrences.

As with most haters, they manage to ignore or deny the positive, such as Ada Lovelace, a Countess who wrote the first-ever computer algorithm and dreamed up the idea of artificial intelligence.

So in the spirit of positivity and hope for improvement in 2016, I thought I would share the story of Katherine Johnson, who calculated the trajectory of Alan Shepherd’s 1961 trip into space, which was America’s first, as published by NASA, where she worked for many years.

I wonder how many techies could do something similar today without using a computer or other current tech.

She Was a Computer When Computers Wore Skirts

08.26.08
By: Jim Hodges 

Katherine Johnson was 90 on Tuesday, an apt date because it also was National Equality Day.

Not that she ever thought she wasn’t equal.

“I didn’t have time for that,” said Johnson in her Hampton home. “My dad taught us ‘you are as good as anybody in this town, but you’re no better.’ I don’t have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”

But probably a lot smarter. She was a “computer” at Langley Research Center “when the computer wore a skirt,” said Johnson. More important, she was living out her life’s goal, though, when it became her goal, she wasn’t sure what it involved.

Johnson was born in White Sulfur Springs, W.Va., where school for African-Americans stopped at eighth grade. Her father, Joshua, was a farmer who drove his family 120 miles to Institute, W. Va., where education continued through high school and then at West Virginia State College. He would get wife Joylette a job as a domestic and leave the family there to be educated while he went back to White Sulfur Springs to make a living.

Katherine skipped though grades to graduate from high school at 14, from college at 18, and her skills at mathematics drew the attention of a young professor, W.W. Schiefflin Claytor.

“He said, ‘You’d make a good research mathematician and I’m going to see that you’re prepared,’ ” she recalled.

“I said, ‘Where will I get a job?’

“And he said, ‘That will be your problem.’

“And I said, ‘What do they do?’

“And he said, ‘You’ll find out.’

“In the back of my mind, I wanted to be a research mathematician.”

It didn’t involve teaching, though she did it for a while, starting at $65 a month. While on vacation from a $100-a-month teaching job in 1952, she was in Newport News. “I heard that Langley was looking for black women computers,” she said.

She was put into a pool, from which she emerged within two weeks to join engineers who, five years later, would become involved in something new called the “Space Task Force.”

That was 1958, when the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
She did the math.

“We wrote our own textbook, because there was no other text about space,” she says. “We just started from what we knew. We had to go back to geometry and figure all of this stuff out. Inasmuch as I was in at the beginning, I was one of those lucky people.”

That luck came in large part because she was no stranger to geometry. It was only natural that she calculate the trajectory of Alan Shepherd’s 1961 trip into space, America’s first.

“The early trajectory was a parabola, and it was easy to predict where it would be at any point,” Johnson says. “Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. I said, ‘Let me do it.

You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.”

More flights became more complicated, with more variables involving place and rotation of Earth and the moon for orbiting. By the time John Glenn was to go up to orbit the Earth, NASA had gone to computers.

“You could do much more, much faster on computer,” Johnson says. “But when they went to computers, they called over and said, ‘tell her to check and see if the computer trajectory they had calculated was correct.’ So I checked it and it was correct.”

So the “computer” began using a computer. And in 1969, while at a sorority meeting in the Pocono Mountains, she gathered with others around a small television set to see Neil Armstrong land on the moon and take the first step by a human there. There was some marveling, but not much.

“It all seemed routine to people by then,” Johnson said.

But there was an extremely nervous “computer.”

“I had done the calculations and knew they were correct,” said Johnson. “But just like driving (to Hampton in traffic) from Williamsburg this morning, anything could happen. I didn’t want anything to happen and it didn’t.”

Her work at Langley spanned from 1953 to 1986. She is still involved in math, tutoring youngsters, and she remembers where NASA’s space program was, even as she watches where it is now on television.

“I found what I was looking for at Langley,” she says. “This was what a research mathematician did. I went to work every day for 33 years happy. Never did I get up and say I don’t want to go to work.”

Johnson also spends time talking with children, making sure that they know of the opportunities that can be had through mathematics and science. She laughs when she talks of being interviewed long distance by a fourth-grade class in Florida.

“Each of them had their questions, and one asked, ‘are you still living?'” Johnson says. “They see your picture in a textbook and think you’re supposed to be dead.”

Far from it. Instead, she’s celebrating yet another birthday on Women’s Equality Day, without admitting that there was a time when she didn’t feel equal.

Her father wouldn’t allow it.

Image credit: NASA

By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.

Today’s generation of college students grew up with things handed to them.  Granted, that is not true for all of them, but it seems to be true for the bulk of my students.

Parents don’t want things to be as tough on their kids as growing up was for themselves.  Schools don’t want parents complaining.  So, the kids get everything just handed to them.

If they don’t work hard, then that’s OK.  They’ll still pass classes.

Do bad grades make them feel bad?  Well, then the solution is to simply do away with bad grades. A local school district several years ago did away with the grade of D because it had negative connotations.  So, now the lowest grade that a student can get is a C.  Other school districts quickly followed suit, since they looked bad for having lower grade point averages.

The Dallas School District even went so far as to revamp its grading policies to make it practically impossible for students to fail or to get low grades.

So, it is no wonder that students come to college without any work ethic.

Last week, we had a speaker come to campus who works as an engineer designing the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the spacecraft that is going to replace the Space Shuttle.  She was amazing.  She was energetic, enthusiastic, and was very excited to be working with real spacecraft.

She gave a presentation where she emphasized how important learning is to succeeding.  She pointed out that all those classes that you think that you will never use have a tendency to teach you things that eventually turn out to be useful.  She is quite young, only a few years older than most of my students.

She has two bachelors degrees, and she is working on two masters degrees.  She is working full time and going to school nearly full time.  She is excited about what she does. She absolutely loves the space program and finds working with NASA to be a dream job.  It is FUN for her.  As she sees it, she is getting paid to have fun. So, she doesn’t mind working extra hours, taking on extra tasks, and working weekends, evenings, holidays, etc., if needed.

I was hoping that her enthusiasm would rub off.  So, this week, I asked my students what they thought of her talk.

One student said that she sounds really boring. Huh?  Boring?  She gets to work with spacecraft.  She gets paid to do things that she finds exciting and fun.  She gets to watch Space Shuttles launch.  She gets to use the simulators that the astronauts use.  She travels all over the country for her job.  She’s boring?

Another student said that she didn’t seem to understand that some classes are hard. Huh?  She has degrees in aeronautical engineering and astronautics.  She is working on degrees in spacecraft systems and human physiology (she is interested in how the human body works in space).  Hey, those are not easy subjects.  She has taken classes far more difficult than anything that my students have ever taken.

Another person said that she can’t understand how anyone could stay in school for so long, commenting that the speaker would probably have six degrees by the time that she is thirty.  So?  What’s wrong with that?

You get ahead by hard work. Many of my students come from fairly affluent upper middle class families, and they have had life just handed to them.

The speaker came from a family where her parents had to work hard and she didn’t have things just handed to her.  She learned to work for things.  That is why she is where she is.  Not everyone is going to get a job working with spacecraft.  She is, indeed, quite young.  But she has a very important job, with lots of responsibility, because of her hard work.

Someone like my students would not get her job.

I told my students that they don’t really have to work as hard as the speaker.  After all, we need people to be assistant managers at fast food restaurants.  They will rise to the appropriate level.

If they work hard, they will become leaders.  If they refuse to work hard, they will be followers all of their lives. I don’t think that they were very happy with me or what I told them, but that’s OK.

If only one of them listens and decides to work hard to get ahead, then I’ve done my job.

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Image credit: NASA