Women in Science, they've always been there, and they've contributed so much. Can we start recognizing them please? RIP Katherine Johnson:: It was not the most arresting of titles: in 1959 the African-American mathematician Katherine Johnson, who has died aged 101, completed a paper entitled Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position. Thus did she become the first woman to have a credit on a report published by the flight research division of the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).

Even more significantly, those calculations were at the basis of a crucial part of Johnson’s work for the astronaut John Glenn, when, in 1962, he became the first American to orbit the Earth. “Get the girl,” the astronaut had said, refusing to fly unless Johnson, with her mastery of mathematics, had verified the computer’s work on her mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.” She did, and he flew.

Her contribution, wrote Margot Lee Shetterly in Hidden Figures (2016) – an authoritative account of Nasa’s black female mathematicians that was made into a film of the same name – was “the defining day of Johnson’s career”.

The focus of the US space programme in the 1960s was the race for the moon. Johnson was involved throughout. She played a key role in Alan Shepard’s 1961 Mercury mission, which put an American in space for the first time. Fifty-six years later, on the anniversary of that venture, the Katherine G Johnson Computational Research Facility was opened in Langley, Virginia. “Millions of people around the world watched Shepard’s flight,” said Clayton Turner, Langley’s deputy director, “but what they didn’t know at the time was that the calculations that got him into space and safely home were done by today’s guest of honour, Katherine Johnson.”Johnson was still calculating trajectories in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first moon landing, and in 1970 when the Apollo 13 mission was aborted and nearly ended in disaster. “Everybody was concerned about them getting there,” she said in 2010. “We were concerned about them getting back.” She was later involved in the early years of the space shuttle, and the Earth Resources satellite.

Until recently the contribution made by Johnson and her fellow African-American colleagues to the US space programme went largely unheralded outside – and sometimes inside – Nasa. But Shetterly’s book, and the ensuing film, with Taraji P Henson in a starring role as Johnson, helped change that. Johnson was one of a group of remarkable women who fought every obstacle an entrenched deeply racist society could throw at them and, eventually, they won.