Katherine Johnson
NASA SPACE SCIENTIST (1918 - 2020)
Katherine Johnson was one of three (and the
only female) Black student to be offered a
place at West Virginia University graduate
programme. She began working for NASA in
1952. In 1960, she co-authored a report
detailing the equations that describe an orbital
spaceflight in which the landing position of the
spacecraft is specified. This was the first time
a woman in the Flight Research Division
received credit as an author of a research
report. The following year she did trajectory
analysis for America's first human spacelift. It
was her role producing and checking the
trajectory equations for astronaut John
Glenn's pioneering Project Mercury orbital
space flight in 1962 that established her
professional reputation. In 2015, at age 97,
President Barack Obama awarded her the
Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Radia Perlman
INTERNET PIONEER (1951 - present)
Both of Radia Perlman's parents were
engineers. She took a programming class in
high school and began to consider a career in
the field. She was the only woman in the
class. After graduating from the prestigious
Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a
PhD in computer science, Perlman went on to
become a leader in the field, developing the
algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol,
an innovation that made the Internet as we
know it possible. She also made significant
contributions to other areas of network design
and standardization, such as link-state routing
protocols.
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