She navigated segregation to become an esteemed mathematician — and today, her work helps billions of people navigate the world.
Gladys West, whose pioneering career contributed key elements to what became the GPS satellite system and was later acknowledged as a "hidden figure" of GPS, died on January 17 aged 95.
West is credited with astounding accomplishments in mathematics, playing pivotal roles in charting orbital trajectories and creating accurate mathematical models of the Earth’s shape that would eventually be used by the GPS satellite orbit.
But, as West admitted in 2020, she did not really rely on the ground-breaking system she helped create.
"I would say minimal," she replied when asked if she used GPS.
"I prefer maps."
Born Gladys Mae Brown in 1930, West grew up in the Jim Crow era, on a small farm in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, south of Richmond. She attended a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher, and in her memoir, It Began with a Dream, West wrote of the aspirations that grew during those early years.
"Every day I wished and dreamed of having more — more books, more classrooms, more teachers, and more time to dream and imagine what life would be like if only I could fly away from the strenuous and seemingly never-ending work on our family farm."
Realising that education could open doors to a new life, West added, "I made a commitment to be the best I could be and absorb as much knowledge that a little farm girl could handle."
As she neared graduation in her segregated high school, teachers urged her to pursue a degree in mathematics.
"If you had left it to me, I would have majored in home economics," she once told Virginia Public Media.
"I really did like geometry. I fell in love with that."
But first West, daughter of farmers who also worked jobs in a tobacco factory and for the railroad, would have to figure out a path to attending college.
"When she learned that the top senior in her high school was guaranteed a scholarship to college, she was motivated to earn that spot and successfully became valedictorian of her class," according to a profile of West in Notices Of The American Mathematical Society.
One year later, West was offered a job in Dahlgren, Virginia, at the Naval Proving Ground.
"There were three other black professionals," West recalled to VPM.
"We were respectful to the leaders and tried to treat them the way we wanted them to treat us if we were in the same position."
One of the other professionals was Ira West, a mathematician; the pair married in 1957.
The couple had three children and seven grandchildren; Ira West died in 2024.
Gladys West worked at the naval programme for 42 years. In a 2021 interview, she said two things helped her cope with the limitations imposed by racism: she enjoyed her work; and she wanted more black people to get a chance to do it.
"I always felt really responsible for being the best and doing the best that I could," she told the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, adding that by setting a positive example, she hoped to undermine discrimination.
"I always felt that I would give my best regardless of what was going on, to give my best of myself because I just respected myself that well."
West’s work grew in tandem with enormous gains in computing. She began her career at a time when cutting-edge computing meant that researchers’ ideas had to be coded as zeros and ones, punched out on cards, and fed into massive machines.
"Sometimes they’d call you to see if you wanted to watch it, to see whether it blows up or it goes," West told Notices Of The American Mathematical Society in 2020. She added, "That was old time; it’s much easier now."
In the early 1960s, she participated in an award-winning, astronomical study that proved the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune.
From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, West used complex algorithms to account for variations in gravitational, tidal and other forces that distort Earth’s shape. She programmed the IBM 7030 computer, also known as Stretch, to deliver increasingly refined calculations for an extremely accurate model of the Earth’s shape, optimised for what ultimately became the GPS orbit used by satellites.
Without her work, and updates that came later, the intricately accurate navigation and timing of GPS would not have been possible, according to the US Space Force.
For most of her life, West’s abilities and achievements were not widely known — similar to other black women doing pivotal work in science and math during the Cold War and highlighted in the 2016 book, Hidden Figures. But West received notable recognition over the past decade, including the military’s Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2018 and the National Museum
of the Surface Navy’s Freedom of the Seas Exploration and Innovation Award in 2023. She also became the first woman to win the Prince Philip Medal, awarded by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering. — AP
