Posted on February 24, 2020 at 10:06 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek

NASA announced this morning that Katherine Johnson, one of the mathematicians profiled in the book and movie Hidden Figures, has died.

Johnson, who was 101 years old, received a flood of highly public acclaim in the final years of her life for the work she did at NASA while also breaking gender and racial barriers.

As a hand “computer,” she did calculations for the first moon landing and the space shuttle program; those contributions were memorialized in Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 bestseller Hidden Figures, upon which the 2017 film was based.

Read more about Johnson’s extraordinary life in her NPR obituary.

Categories: Today in Books

Tagged As: History, Nonfiction, Obituary

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