Katherine Johnson Trivia
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50 free Katherine Johnson trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Katherine Johnson started high school at ten, graduated college at eighteen, and joined the segregated "Colored Computers" pool at Langley in 1953. Within years the flight research engineers "forgot to return" her, and she was calculating Alan Shepard's trajectory, re-checking the electronic computer's numbers at John Glenn's personal insistence, and plotting the charts that helped bring Apollo 13 home. She lived to 101, collected the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, and watched Taraji P. Henson play her in Hidden Figures. Easy questions ask which astronaut refused to fly until she checked the maths and which film told her story. Harder ones want her West Virginia birthplace, the professor who created courses just for her, the Supreme Court case that opened her graduate school, the name on the door of her segregated office, the colleague who insisted her name go on a report, the one-star navigation system she devised, the satellite named for her and the buildings, schools and spacecraft that carry her name. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Katherine Johnson and Hidden Figures, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for STEM teachers, Black History Month planners and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: NASA, Space Race and Women in Science.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1957 Soviet launch pulled Johnson's flight research team into the new field of spaceflight?
Sputnik
Sputnik redirected her career: the engineers she worked with became the core of America's first space team, and with no textbook on spaceflight to consult, they wrote their own.
Q 02Which astronaut refused to fly unless Johnson personally verified the computer's numbers for his orbit?
John Glenn
John Glenn told engineers to "get the girl" and have her rerun the orbital equations by hand; if she said the numbers were good, he said, he was ready to go.
Q 03Whose 2016 nonfiction book was the film Hidden Figures based on?
Margot Lee Shetterly
Margot Lee Shetterly knew the setting first-hand: she grew up in Hampton, Virginia, the daughter of a research scientist at Langley, where Johnson spent her career.
Q 04Who played Johnson in Hidden Figures?
Taraji P. Henson
Taraji P. Henson appeared alongside the real Johnson at the 2017 Oscars, where the audience rose to give the retired mathematician a standing ovation.
Q 05Which president awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honour?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama gave her the medal in November 2015, the year before the book and film Hidden Figures told her story to the wider public.
Q 06Johnson was born in which West Virginia town, home of the Greenbrier resort?
White Sulphur Springs
White Sulphur Springs is where her father farmed, did odd jobs and worked at the Greenbrier, and where he told his children they were as good as anybody in town, but no better.
Q 07What took Johnson's family 120 miles from home when she was ten?
A Black high school
A Black high school: schooling for Black children in her county ended at eighth grade, so her father drove the family to Institute each year and went back alone to keep earning.
Q 08After finishing college at 18, Johnson took her first job as what?
A schoolteacher
A schoolteacher at a Black public school in Marion, Virginia, was her start, and she was back in a classroom some fifteen years later when she learned that Langley was hiring Black women mathematicians.
Q 09A college professor created which maths course just for Johnson, one she later drew on to plot spacecraft paths?
Analytic geometry
Analytic geometry wasn't taught at her college until W. W. Schieffelin Claytor put it on for her; he had told her she would make a good research mathematician and that he would see she was prepared.
Q 10Which programming language did Johnson's first Langley supervisor master as electronic machines replaced human calculators?
FORTRAN
FORTRAN was the supervisor's answer to the machines: when her segregated section was abolished in 1958, she joined Langley's new electronic computing division and became an expert programmer.
Q 11Johnson was one of three Black students chosen to integrate which university's graduate school?
West Virginia University
West Virginia University opened its graduate school after a 1938 Supreme Court ruling told states to give Black students the education they offered white ones; the only woman of the three, she left after one session.
Q 12Which agency hired Johnson in 1953, five years before it was absorbed into NASA?
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had begun hiring Black women mathematicians during World War II, and a relative's tip at a family gathering sent Johnson to apply.
Q 13Who supervised the all-Black West Area unit to which Johnson was first assigned?
Q 21Where was Johnson when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon?
At a meeting in the Pocono Mountains
At a meeting in the Pocono Mountains, a sorority convention, she watched on a small television with the other guests, sure of her sums but nervous that something could still go wrong.
Q 22Johnson's work on Apollo 13 backup procedures led to which method for astronauts to fix their position?
A one-star observation system
A one-star observation system lets a crew match a single star against an onboard chart to find where they are; it grew out of the scramble to plot Apollo 13's safe path home.
Q 23The Earth Resources Technology Satellite that Johnson worked on late in her career was later renamed what?
Dorothy Vaughan
Dorothy Vaughan had led the unit since 1949 as the agency's first Black supervisor, and two weeks after Johnson arrived she sent her on loan to the flight researchers.
Q 14What did Miriam Mann do whenever a segregation sign appeared on her Langley cafeteria table?
Hid it in her purse
Hid it in her purse: the sign marked the table set aside for the lab's Black women mathematicians, and each new one went the same way until at last nobody replaced it.
Q 15Why did Johnson's loan to flight research never end, by her account?
The male engineers "forgot to return" her
The male engineers "forgot to return" her, as she put it: the loan began two weeks into the job, and she spent the next four years analysing flight-test data alongside them.
Q 16What did Johnson ask to attend, where "no women had gone before"?
Editorial meetings
Editorial meetings were closed to women until she asked whether there was a law against her going; there wasn't, and the engineers let her in.
Q 17What did Johnson say she did at lunch at Langley, where she "didn't feel the segregation"?
Play bridge
She would play bridge at lunch, she said, at a place where everybody had a mission; the game stayed with her, and in 2016 a reporter watched her and her partner win at her apartment.
Q 18In 1960 Johnson became the first woman in her division to receive what?
Credit on a research report
Credit on a research report came only because Ted Skopinski, leaving for Houston, told their boss that Katherine should finish it, since she had done most of the work.
Q 19Whose 1961 flight, the first by an American in space, did Johnson calculate the trajectory for?
Alan Shepard
Alan Shepard's 15-minute hop was simple enough for her to run in reverse: tell her where the capsule should come down, she said, and she would tell them when to launch.
Q 20Which Mercury capsule carried the first American into space on Johnson's numbers?
Freedom 7
Freedom 7 never circled the Earth: it flew a single arc lasting about 15 minutes and splashed down some 300 miles from the launch pad.
Landsat
Landsat has watched the planet's land surface since 1972, and its free images now help farmers, foresters and planners decide how land and water are used.
Q 24Johnson retired in 1986, the year NASA lost which space shuttle?
Challenger
Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch in January 1986, a bleak start to her last year at the agency whose shuttle programme she had helped get off the ground.
Q 25Which Langley colleague of Johnson's became NASA's first Black female engineer in 1958?
Mary Jackson
Mary Jackson first had to win permission from the City of Hampton to take the required courses, because they were taught in a school reserved for white students.
Q 26What did the young Johnson say she did with the steps to church, the dishes she washed and everything else?
Counted them
Counted them: "anything that could be counted, I did," she recalled, and that appetite for numbers had her skipping grades until she was years ahead of children her own age.
Q 27Which toy line released a Katherine Johnson doll, complete with NASA badge, in 2018?
Barbie
Barbie made her one of the first three dolls in its Inspiring Women line, beside Amelia Earhart and Frida Kahlo, and she worked with the designers to get the face right.
Q 28Johnson called her greatest contribution the maths that let Apollo's lunar lander do what after leaving the Moon?
Rejoin the orbiting command module
Rejoin the orbiting command module: if that rendezvous failed the moonwalkers had no way home, which is why she said her team worried less about getting there than about getting back.
Q 29What NASA award, often called "the astronaut's award", did Johnson receive from Leland Melvin in 2016?
The Silver Snoopy
The Silver Snoopy is a lapel pin that astronauts hand over in person to no more than 1 in 100 NASA workers a year, and each one has first flown in space; hers went up on the shuttle Atlantis.
Q 30What kind of building at NASA Langley was named for Johnson on the 55th anniversary of America's first human spaceflight?
A computing facility
A computing facility took her name because, as Langley's deputy director told the crowd, millions had watched that first flight without knowing whose calculations got the astronaut up and safely home.