When did you turn to space and aeronautics? She said I could play outside, but who was I going to play with? I stayed and did the first grade work. When I turned 4, Mother took me to school with her. We lived in Union County, North Carolina, right outside of Charlotte. When girls were inside playing, I was in the street, bicycle riding, skating and racing with the boys. I also helped my dad work on his car and change the oil.
She was disappointed because, instead of playing with the doll, I cut it open to see why it talked. My mother tells the story of giving me a talking doll when I was 5. Have you always been interested in math and science? The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA WIKI HOW TO
Quanta Magazine spoke with Darden recently about her experience working for NASA, how to make fast planes quieter, and her surreptitious visits to speak with schoolchildren and Girl Scouts. All four women were awarded Congressional Gold Medals in 2019 for their scientific contributions. She was featured in Margot Lee Shetterly’s 2016 book Hidden Figures, alongside Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson - three Black women mathematicians at NASA who made significant contributions at pivotal moments in the space race. “It sounds like a sharp thunderclap,” said Darden, who published more than 50 papers on high-lift wing design in supersonic flow, flap design and sonic boom prediction and minimization.ĭarden retired from NASA in 2007 after a 40-year career. Should the plane exceed the speed of sound - dubbed Mach 1 - the waves coalesce into a potentially destructive shock wave called a sonic boom.
As the plane speeds up, these waves get closer together.
KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA WIKI SERIES
The cone moves with the plane and emits a series of pressure waves that travel at the speed of sound. This creates an invisible, cone-shaped pressure field whose tip is on the aircraft’s nose and whose sides surround the plane. The fundamental problem she worked on, the sonic boom, begins when an airplane pushes air molecules out of the way as it flies. The goal has always been to accelerate the adoption of quieter, greener, safer, faster and more efficient planes - even supersonic ones, which travel faster than sound. Her groundbreaking work laid the foundation for a new era of research on experimental planes (known as X-planes) that NASA launched in 2016. “I really enjoy the story of what these mathematical equations do in the physical world.” “Despite my doctorate, I probably have more of a mathematics background,” she said. She went on to lead the Sonic Boom Group of NASA’s High-Speed Research Program, though she never stopped thinking of herself as a mathematician. To do the creative mathematical work she craved, Darden needed to recast herself as an engineer.ĭarden transferred to NASA’s male-dominated engineering division and later earned an engineering doctorate. However, she soon discovered that her role as a mathematician was limited to performing time-consuming calculations by hand. That paved the way for Christine Darden, who earned a master’s degree in mathematics at a historically Black university in 1967 and was hired into NASA’s all-female pool of “human computers” at the Langley Research Center. Not long after, in 1941, Roosevelt issued executive order 8802, prompting several agencies, including the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics - NACA, the precursor to NASA - to begin hiring Black workers. Philip Randolph persuaded President Roosevelt to end discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in defense-industry employment. Just before World War II, the American civil rights activist A.
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