The Famous Mathematician behind the development of the GPS

Today, if there are no paper maps and we can go to places we’ve never been before; if we can fly planes or use Google maps, it is thanks to Gladys West, born in 1930.

Gladys West is an American Mathematician born in Virginia and credited for her work in creating the Global Positioning System (GPS). As an African American woman born in a rural area, the expectation was for Gladys to become a farmer or work at a tobacco processing plant. However, smartness, brilliance and talent changed the story as she went on to study Mathematics at Virginia State University – a historically black college. She was awarded a full scholarship to the Virginia State University after graduating as the valedictorian of her high-school class. There, she obtained her degree in 1952 and her master’s degree in 1955.

Her biggest challenges are obvious: racism and sexism. Gladys West was turned down from many jobs because white men were preferred. She taught in a racially segregated school in Virginia before getting a job in 1956 as a mathematician with the U.S Naval Proving Ground, a weapons laboratory in Dahlgren. She was the second African American woman to be hired there at the time.

At Dahlgren, she excelled in computer programming due to her skill in solving complex mathematical equations, first by hand and eventually by programming computers to solve them for her. One of her first wins was when she worked on project NORC (The Naval Ordinance Research Calculator), which involved hundreds of hours of computer calculations that had to be double checked for errors by hand. This project turned out to be an award-winning program which determined the movements of Pluto in relation to Neptune. Today, she is widely credited for her work on satellite geodesy and other satellite measurements that contributed to the accuracy of GPS.

?In 2018, she was inducted by the United States Air Force Hall of Fame, which is one of the highest honors of the Air Force Space Command. In this, she was recognized as part of the team who did the computing for the US military before electronic systems were invented. She contributed to the accuracy of the GPS and the measurement of satellite data.

Written by Ngumsi Abonwi Mforteh