"You can’t be a man, don’t even try. Be a woman. It's powerful business when done correctly"

When you hear "girls aren't good at math," you often hear this from people who buy in to other stupid generalities. The fact is, we're all born equal, tabula rasa, and if we're very lucky we have someone who can nurture an interest into something that can become the making of a life.

Katherine Johnson was born in Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, the daughter of a school-teacher and a farmer/ janitor. This was back when educations for women weren't abundant and were specifically limited for colored people.

And just about the only thing that she could do that might open up that world, the only thing that was open to her in 19-something was to get her education. Some women were allowed to do that. Even if it was limited, was corseted. And I can't fathom how hard that must've been.

Luckily, Katherine was born to a family that would go the extra mile for education…literally. There were no schools in her town that taught Black children past the eighth grade, so her father moved Johnson and her siblings to a town over 100 miles away.

In appreciation of his sacrifice, Johnson worked hard, graduating from West Virginia High school at 14 and from West Virginia State University at 18 years old. A math prodigy, she would go to work, literally, as a “human computer” for Langley Research Center, a part of NACA – the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would become NASA.

Johnson and the many other women at Langley Air Force Center were described as a “math whizzes in skirts.” Her all-female team would perform mathematical calculations and read the data from the black boxes of planes. It was only on a day where she was asked to fill in on the all-male flight research team that Johnson made her way up the aeronautics ladder.

Her performance was so amazing that her superiors “forgot” to return her to the women’s math pool. From there, she took on other projects like calculating the trajectory for the space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space in 1959. And in 1962, when NASA used computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn’s orbit around Earth, officials called on Katherine Johnson to verify the computer’s results.

Now 95, Ms. Johnson is long-retired. I met her once, in the late 90s, at a church in downtown Newport News. She was an old lady at the time, though not nearly as old as she is now. I'm sure she's enjoying her time with family and living assistance, and being a legend who got to be a key part of history

Often, it seems like the hardest thing that some people can never realize their dreams,. That they can be dashed. Sometimes it's the person's fault. Sometimes it's society's fault. I'd like to think she's proud of what she accomplished. I'd also like to think she isn't disheartened that she wasn't given the opportunity to go around the planet in that shuttle. I think everyone wants the chance to prove that they can lead rather than being someone else's agent.