Gladys West (1930-present) is a pioneering Air Force mathematician whose work was instrumental in developing the mathematical and computational modeling that drives modern GPS technology.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s STEMinist is a pioneering Air Force mathematician whose work was instrumental in developing the mathematical and computational modeling that drives modern GPS technology. Though for many years she went unrecognized for the incredible contributions she made to modern life, she is finally receiving the credit she so deserves. Let’s talk about an extraordinary living legend: Gladys West.
Gladys Mae Brown was born in 1930 in the rural community of Dinwiddie County, Virginia. Her parents were small-time farmers, as were most of their neighbors.
From a young age, Gladys knew that a life of farming was not for her. She figured her most likely way off the farm was through education, so she threw herself into her studies, receiving top marks in all of her classes. At the time, the top two students at her high school were guaranteed scholarships to Virginia State University, and she needed to be one of them. Gladys graduated as valedictorian in 1948, scholarship in hand.
At Virginia State University, Gladys initially struggled to decide what she wanted to study before choosing to major in mathematics. She also joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, where she thrived socially.
After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Gladys took a job teaching at a school in Waverly, Virginia. She lasted two years there before heading back to Virginia State to earn a Masters degree in Math, which she received in 1955.
A year later, Gladys was hired as a mathematician to analyze satellite data at what was then called the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. She was just one of four African Americans working at the large facility at the time. Gladys started out as a human computer, somebody who, in the days before smartphones and fancy calculators, actually did the math by hand. But it wasn’t long before she shifted to work on programming computer machines instead.
For most of the early 1960s, Gladys worked on a study of the orbital resonance between Neptune and Pluto. Orbital resonance is the relationship between orbiting bodies that exert regular, periodic gravitational influence on each other. Following the success of this study, Gladys became the project manager of the Seasat radar altimetry project.
Though “Seasat radar altimetry” hardly sounds sexy, it really was an extraordinary project. Before Seasat, it was almost impossible to precisely measure distances over the surface of the earth, or between earth and a secondary object like a satellite or airplane. The issue came down to the fact that the earth isn’t a perfect sphere, but a geoid, and is complicated further by the starring role that oceans and tides play in determining the irregularities in the earth’s shape. In order to accurately model the shape of the planet to get precise distance measurements, a real understanding of variable sea levels was needed.
Seasat was the first technology that used radar to remotely sense oceans by measuring the distance between the satellite and the surface of the oceans on earth. Over the course of many years, Gladys used the data she received from Seasat and later satellites to refine an increasingly precise and detailed mathematical model of the earth’s shape. This modeling would eventually become vital to one of today’s favorite technological advancements: GPS. Modern GPS, or Global Positioning System, relies on Gladys’s mathematical model to determine a receiver’s position. Without the accuracy that Gladys’s model provides, GPS would be essentially useless.
In 1998, after working at the Dahlgren facility for 42 years, Gladys decided to retire. Five months later, she suffered a stroke but persevered through a hard recovery with one goal in mind: to finish a PhD in Public Administration she’d started at Virginia Tech. She earned her degree in 2018.
Despite the fact that Gladys was instrumental in the development of a technology as prominent and important as GPS, her role remained mostly unknown to the general public. That all changed when she submitted a short personal biography for an event honoring her college sorority. When one of her sorority sisters read that Gladys had been on the team that developed GPS, she became determined to share Gladys’s story with the world. In 2018, the Associated Press published a story about Gladys and her many accomplishments. Almost immediately after, the United States Military issued a press release officially recognizing Gladys for the pioneer she is.
On December 6, 2018, Gladys was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame in a long overdue pentagon ceremony.
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Talk to you tomorrow!