Background: MIDN John Johnson

Johnson, born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the oldest of five boys. His family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he attended East Chapel Hill High School, playing football and running track. He also took advanced mathematics courses at the University of North Carolina during his senior year of high school. Upon his high school graduation, Johnson reported to Annapolis with the class of 2021 in June of 2017. 

A member of the 29th Company, Johnson served as a company platoon commander during his 1st class year. An Honors Mathematics major, he was selected for the USNA Trident Scholar Program and conducted research on matroid invariants and error correcting codes. He participated in the United Kingdom and International Scholarship Program, several mathematics competitions, the math and chess clubs, and intramurals. Johnson was near the top of his class at the Academy, holding a 3.97 GPA and at the time of his death, was ranked in the top 100 academically, and top 40 overall amongst his classmates. He was on the Superintendent's List the majority of his time at USNA.

Johnson was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Association Leadership Award for Academic Year 2019, which is peer-selected by the top ranked (in aptitude for commissioning) midshipmen in each class in each battalion. 

As a Trident scholar, in the last few months of his life, Johnson was conducting research at the forefront of theoretical mathematics. He published a paper titled “A non-associative incidence near-ring with a generalized Möbius function” in the journal Ars Mathematica Contemporanea together with his advisor Professor Wakefield. During the same few months, Johnson was selected to commission as part of the Navy Special Warfare group. John Johnson was truly a rare and remarkable patriot. The Johnson scholar program aims to inspire midshipmen to conduct advanced mathematical research while at the Naval Academy, following in the footsteps of John Johnson.