Katherine Johnson was a brilliant mathematician who was born on August 26, 1918, and died on February 24, 2020! She was so good at math that people called her a human computer! When NASA was trying to send the first astronauts into space, they asked Katherine to solve super hard math problems. Her numbers told the spaceships exactly where to go and how to return safely to Earth!
She helped plot the flight path for the very first American in space, and she even helped astronauts travel all the way to the Moon! The astronauts trusted her math so much that they asked her to double-check the computers before they launched. She showed everyone that girls can be amazing at math and change the world with their smart brains!