Ele Willoughby, PhD
@minouette@spore.social  ·  activity timestamp last week

Happy birthday to mathematician and NASA scientist Katherine Johnson (née Coleman; 1918 – 2020). One of the first Black women employed as a NASA scientist (and its predecessor NACA), she was known for her mastery of complex manual calculations of orbital mechanics and played a pivotal role in the success of the US crewed spaceflights from the beginning. Her work included calculating the trajectories, 🧵1/

#linocut #printmaking #sciart#womenInSTEM#BlackInSTEM #histsci #mathematics #physics

My linocut portrait of Katherine Johnson in a upward gradient of raspberry to purple ink (she is a Black woman in a shirt dress, with pearls, glasses and a watch, holding a pencil, facing left with her arms out on an unseen table like she was writing, looking at the viewer over her right shoulder). Behind her on the right is the Project Mercury rocket with capsule and launch trajectory in black. Beside her on right is the Earth in blue with two images of the Moon in silver above to show the trajectory for the Apollo Lunar Module.
My linocut portrait of Katherine Johnson in a upward gradient of raspberry to purple ink (she is a Black woman in a shirt dress, with pearls, glasses and a watch, holding a pencil, facing left with her arms out on an unseen table like she was writing, looking at the viewer over her right shoulder). Behind her on the right is the Project Mercury rocket with capsule and launch trajectory in black. Beside her on right is the Earth in blue with two images of the Moon in silver above to show the trajectory for the Apollo Lunar Module.
My linocut portrait of Katherine Johnson in a upward gradient of raspberry to purple ink (she is a Black woman in a shirt dress, with pearls, glasses and a watch, holding a pencil, facing left with her arms out on an unseen table like she was writing, looking at the viewer over her right shoulder). Behind her on the right is the Project Mercury rocket with capsule and launch trajectory in black. Beside her on right is the Earth in blue with two images of the Moon in silver above to show the trajectory for the Apollo Lunar Module.