The daughters of Katherine Johnson, Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore, pose with FOCUS student Olena Bromell following last June's dedication of the Katherine G. Johnson Hall on Mason's Science and Technology Campus. Photo by Evan Cantwell, Creative Services.
George Mason University will honor trailblazing former NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson in the days following her death on Monday morning. She was 101.
“Hidden Figures,” the 2016 hit movie that chronicles Johnson’s fight and that of her colleagues against institutional racism to help land a man on the moon, will be shown in her honor at the Verizon Auditorium in Colgan Hall on the Science and Technology Campus on Thursday, Feb. 27, at 4 p.m. and again at 7 p.m. Mason renamed the building in her honor in June 2019.
In addition, Johnson will be among those remembered prior to the start of tonight's Mason men's basketball game at EagleBank Arena against fourth-ranked Dayton as part of Black African Heritage Month celebrations.
Johnson worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for 33 years, performing complex calculations and flight path analysis for U.S. spacecraft in the early years of the space program, including for the Apollo 11 flight to the moon in 1969. She worked on the space shuttle program before retiring from NASA in 1986. NASA facilities have been renamed in her honor, and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.