Woman of the Week – Gladys West

Gladys West is an American mathematician known for her discovery of technology that later led to the modern-day global positioning system (GPS). She was inducted into the Air Force Hall of Fame last year.

West was born in 1931 to a farming family of sharecroppers in Virginia. As a young girl, she knew she didn’t want to follow in her family’s path of farming or factory work. Instead, she pursued an education with the specific goal of attending Virginia State College.

Hearing that the top two graduates of her class would earn full scholarships to the college, West graduated valedictorian and went on to study mathematics at Virginia State College. After graduation, she taught for a few years and then went back to school for a master’s degree.

In 1956, she started work at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division. She was the second black woman to be employed there. One of her first projects there was an astronomical study that found out more about Pluto’s regularity of motion in relation to Neptune. West worked with a small group of women to bring forward a wave of electronic systems in the 1950s and 60s. This was the same group that was highlighted in the recent movie and book “Hidden Figures.”

West also programmed an IBM 7030 “Stretch” Computer that output refined calculations for an “extremely accurate geodetic Earth model, a geoid, optimized,” which eventually became the technology behind the GPS we know today.

To program Stretch, the team used “complex algorithms to account for variations in gravitational, tidal, and other forces that distort Earth’s shape” to discover the refined calculations, according to an Air Force press release.

West collected data from the orbiting machines and narrowed her focus on information that helped her determine their exact location in the world. The calculations took a great deal of time and accuracy. At the time, she didn’t think of what they would become, but only focused on getting them correct.

But as computerized maps made their way onto our phones and into our cars, West was not acknowledged as the brains behind it until recently.

West was writing a simple bio on herself for an alumni function for her college sorority and her short bio struck fellow Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority member Gwen James, who had no idea that her friend had such an important role in the technology.

James and West spoke on the discovery in a local newspaper story shortly after West was honored by the Air Force.

She and her husband are currently living in King George County, Virginia, where they remain active and enjoy time with their children and grandchildren. Ironically though, West still prefers to use a paper map.