Creola Katherine Coleman, better known by the surname of her second husband, Johnson, or by that of her first husband, Goble, was an American mathematician.

She showed an early talent for mathematics and had to move away to study, because the county where she lived did not allow Black students to go on to secondary school (Creola Katherine was African American). She graduated in mathematics very young, went on to further study and worked as a teacher.

In 1953 she joined NACA (later NASA), which hired African American women to carry out calculations. The work meant doing calculations by hand on data from aircraft black boxes, or on the effects of strong winds on flights. She was soon moved to the section dealing with space missions. There her job was to calculate rocket trajectories, launch windows and return paths, including for flights to the Moon (which required outstanding skill in calculation and in working with decimal numbers). She faced many difficulties caused by racial segregation (for example, Black staff had to eat separately from white staff and use separate toilets), but her work was highly valued, so much so that she was the only woman admitted to the design meetings.

In 1962, when NASA began to use electronic computers to calculate orbital flight, her role was scaled back for a while. However, she was asked to check the calculations for the Mercury mission: the astronaut John Glenn had made it a condition for flying, as he apparently trusted her, and her alone. Her knowledge of physics, computer science and aerospace engineering also made her essential to the later space missions, on which she kept working. In 1970 she helped plan the emergency return of the Apollo 13 astronauts, who had had to abort their mission after an oxygen tank exploded.

To find out more about the life of Katherine Johnson, we recommend the film “Hidden Figures” (2016).