During her time there, she broke racial barriers, like using the bathroom that was supposed to be for white women only. She and the other women worked as “human computers,” figuring out the difficult calculations needed for spaceflight. In 1952, when she was 34 years old, she learned about jobs for Black women with mathematics and computing skills at the Langley laboratory at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would later become NASA. She later enrolled in graduate school at West Virginia University to study math but left early to raise a family and return to teaching. After she graduated with honors at 18, Johnson taught Black students math. She started high school when she was just 10 years old (most kids are in fourth or fifth grade when they’re 10!) and college when she was 15. Math came easy to her, but she worked hard to master geometry and algebra. Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26, 1918.
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