KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA MATHEMATICIAN DIES

Katherine Johnson ( August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020) died at the age of 101. She was the person who studied the trajectory for mission Freedom 7 : Alan Shepard , on May 5 1961, became the first American in space, one month after Russian Yuri Gagarin had become the first person in space.

The space agency said she had a "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist".Wikipedia

In movie Hidden Figures the life of cultured African-American women in the 1960s is depicted.

 We needed to be assertive as women in those days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be. In the early days of NASA women were not allowed to put their names on the reports – no woman in my division had had her name on a report. I was working with Ted Skopinski and he wanted to leave and go to Houston ... but Henry Pearson, our supervisor – he was not a fan of women – kept pushing him to finish the report we were working on. Finally, Ted told him, "Katherine should finish the report, she's done most of the work anyway." So Ted left Pearson with no choice; I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something.http://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Johnson_Katherine.html