Outlier: The Story of Katherine Johnson

Good morning, I am going to be looking at a documentary on Katherine Johnson, whom was a girl wonder when it came to math.  She was the genius behind the first space flights for the United States.  The documentary is called Outlier: The Story of Katherine Johnson and the run time for this documentary is 54:12.

Katherine Johnson was an African American girl-wonder who was a mathematical genius.  She loved mathematics and would count the steps going into church.  Her genius helped catapult astronauts into space.  She was an integral part of NASA and was profiled in the movie “Hidden Figures.”  Her computations were important to the first missions to space.  Who was this woman?  Why did she have such an impact on history?  This documentary features an interview with Katherine Johnson.

Everything in mathematics has a solution, either you are right or wrong.   The introduction to Katherine Johnson’s story is awesome, it really sets the pace for the documentary about her.  She was born in West Virginia and her father encouraged her love of math and the love of learning.  She was the youngest of four children.  Katherine enjoyed math and loved going outside with her brothers.  She was always prepared to defend herself against bullies.

Katherine was ten when she was ready for high school.  However, schools were segregated and so to go to high school was a challenge.  Her family would move so she and her siblings could go to high school and earn high school diplomas.  Katherine would have grown up in the Great Depression.  The farm income was not enough to send four children to high school.  Her father would get a job at an exclusive resort.  Katherine would work at this resort on school break.  Katherine was cleaning a room with a French woman.  She understood the conversation and as a result, someone was able to help her out with learning French.

Eventually, she would go to college and graduate with two degrees.  One of those degrees was in French.  In college she would encounter a math professor, Dr. Schieffelin Clayton and he was a mathematical genius himself.  She took every single math class that the college was offered and so new classes needed to be created and Dr. Schieffelin Clayton was the one to do it.  He also encouraged her to go into math research.  Career opportunities for Katherine would have been limited and she became a teacher.  She made the class interesting for her students.

She would eventually get married to James Goble and she married him in secret.  Married women at the time would quit their jobs at the time of their marriage.  Even after her marriage she continued to work and continued her education.  She enrolled in a master’s program.  Eventually, she discovered that she was pregnant so she would quit graduate school and her teaching job.  Katherine would go back to teaching when the rules were relaxed when it came to married women teaching.

Eventually, Katherine would apply for a government job in Hampton Roads Virginia.  The job required her to do research to help assist in improving airplane efficiency.  At the facility, there was a wind tunnel that would test a variety of airplanes.  There was a lot of data that was created during these tests and this data needed to be interpreted.  The government would hire computers, people who were good at data interpretation and condensing that data down.  These people would be a resource for the government to further aeronautics research.  Katherine passed all the tests when she applied for the job and would eventually get a job with this government program.  What would Katherine do with this job?  Where would this job take her?  Tune into the rest of this episode to find out more about Katherine Johnson.

The interviews with Katherine and her daughters were very good.  I enjoyed listening to stories from her former students as well.  The documentary was very well-paced and I enjoyed the narrator.  This documentary featured a good deal of information on Katherine Johnson.  It was also excellent in talking about the space race.  Overall, this would be a documentary that I would show to a history class room and I would show this to a math classroom as well.