Katherine Johnson and the Apollo 11 Trajectory

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in the 1920s offered no schooling for Black children past eighth grade. Katherine Coleman had already finished that work by around age 10, so her parents, Joshua and Joylette, split their year between Institute, West Virginia, where a Black high school sat on the campus of West Virginia State College, and White Sulphur Springs in summer, where Joshua farmed and worked at the Greenbrier resort. Joshua was self-taught in mathematics, and his daughter inherited the hunger for it. She entered that high school at 10, graduated, and enrolled at West Virginia State College itself by 15. There, mathematics professor Dr. William W. Schieffelin Claytor noticed her and built a special analytic geometry course just for her, a rare personal investment in a teenage girl's future in a field with almost no women or Black students in it at all. She graduated in 1937, summa cum laude, at 18, with a B.S. in mathematics and French. It was a credential most doors of the era would still refuse to open for her. But the arithmetic Joshua Coleman had taught his daughter on a farm in Greenbrier County, and the geometry Claytor had built for her alone, were about to matter more than either of them could have arranged.