Katherine Coleman Johnson 1918-2020 Birthplace: White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia Widowed mother of 3 in 1959 remarrying 3 years later Mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics and trajectories for NASA were critical to the success of the first US space flight, Apollo 11 . Author Katherine Johnson’s intelligence and skill with numbers was recognized when she was a child. She was attending high school at age 10, graduating from West Virginia State College with