Well, hello there! My name is Katherine Johnson, and I would like to tell you the story of my life.

I was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26th, 1918.

As a young girl, I always loved math. I was only thirteen years old when I attended high school! Can you believe it? I was ahead of all of the students in my class, even though I was younger than them. When I turned 18, I went to college to study--you guessed it!-- math.

When I first began working at NASA, I worked in the West Area Computing Group with many other talented and smart women. I stayed working there for nine years before I was called to a different position.

NASA needed to send a man up to space as soon as they could, but they hadn't had the math figured out to get there. They hired me to be a human computer, which is just a fancy way of saying that I did math, and a lot of it, every single day. In just a few short months, I was able to crack the math code that got John Glenn up and back down safely from space!

I figured it out!

Lot's of Math

Though most know me for my work on John Glenn's mission, I also worked on the Apollo 11 mission, which landed Neil Armstrong on the moon. In 2015, President Obama awarded me the Presidential Medal of Honor. After 33 years, I retired from working at NASA, and I loved every minute of it!

Hello! My name is Margaret Hamilton.

I was born on August 17th, 1936, in Paoli, Indiana.

Like Katherine, my passion growing up was math. After graduating from Earlham College in 1958, I taught math for a time in Indiana before moving to Boston, Massachusetts.

I love math!

I took a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and created a program that was able to predict weather patterns. My career as a software engineer (it's a fancy way of saying I create programs for computers) took off after that.