Katherine Johnson Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician who calculated and analyzed the flight paths of many spacecrafts during her more than three decades with the U.S. space program. Her work helped send astronauts to the Moon. When she was a small child, it became apparent that she had a brilliant intelligence and amazing skill with numbers. She attended high school at the young age of 10! She then went on to graduate college at 18 years old with her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and French. While teaching in Virginia, she was selected to be one of the first three African American students to enroll in a graduate program at West Virginia University In 1953 she started working for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ West Area Computing unit. This committee was made up of African American women who manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the engineers in the programs.