RIP Gladys Mae West, the Pioneering Black Mathematician Who Helped Lay the Foundation for GPS

Gladys Mae West was born in rur­al Vir­ginia in 1930, grew up work­ing on a tobac­co farm, and died ear­li­er this month a cel­e­brat­ed math­e­mati­cian whose work made pos­si­ble the GPS tech­nol­o­gy most of us use each and every day. Hers was a dis­tinc­tive­ly Amer­i­can life, in more ways than one. Seek­ing an escape from the agri­cul­tur­al labor she’d already got­ten to know all too well, she won a schol­ar­ship to Vir­ginia State Col­lege by becom­ing her high school class vale­dic­to­ri­an; after earn­ing her bach­e­lor’s and mas­ter’s degrees in math­e­mat­ics, she taught for a time and then applied for a job at the naval base up in Dahlgren. She first dis­tin­guished her­self there by ver­i­fy­ing the accu­ra­cy of bomb­ing tables with a hand cal­cu­la­tor, and from there moved on up to the com­put­er pro­gram­ming team.

This was the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties, when pro­gram­ming a com­put­er meant not cod­ing, but labo­ri­ous­ly feed­ing punch cards into an enor­mous main­frame. West and her col­leagues used IBM’s first tran­sis­tor­ized machine, the 7030 (or “Stretch”), which was for a few years the fastest com­put­er in the world.

It cost an equiv­a­lent of $81,860,000 in today’s dol­lars, but no oth­er com­put­er had the pow­er to han­dle the project of cal­cu­lat­ing the pre­cise shape of Earth as affect­ed by grav­i­ty and the nature of the oceans. About a decade lat­er, anoth­er team of gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists made use of those very same cal­cu­la­tions when putting togeth­er the mod­el employed by the World Geo­det­ic Sys­tem, which GPS satel­lites still use today. Hence the ten­den­cy of cel­e­bra­to­ry obit­u­ar­ies to under­score the point that with­out West­’s work, GPS would­n’t be pos­si­ble.

Nor do any of them neglect to point out the fact that West was black, one of just four such math­e­mati­cians work­ing for the Navy at Dahlgren. Sto­ries like hers have drawn much greater pub­lic inter­est since the suc­cess of Hid­den Fig­ures, the Hol­ly­wood adap­ta­tion of Mar­got Lee Shet­ter­ly’s book about the black female math­e­mati­cians at NASA dur­ing the Space Race. When that movie came out, in 2016, even West­’s own chil­dren did­n’t know the impor­tance of the once-clas­si­fied work she’d done. Only in 2018, when she pro­vid­ed that infor­ma­tion on a bio­graph­i­cal form she filled out for an event host­ed by her col­lege soror­i­ty, did it become pub­lic. She thus spent the last years of her long life as a celebri­ty, sought out by aca­d­e­mics and jour­nal­ists eager to under­stand the con­tri­bu­tions of anoth­er no-longer-hid­den fig­ure. But to their ques­tions about her own GPS use, she report­ed­ly answered that she pre­ferred a good old-fash­ioned paper map.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­garet Hamil­ton, Lead Soft­ware Engi­neer of the Apol­lo Project, Stands Next to Her Code That Took Us to the Moon (1969)

Women’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tions to Mod­ern Genet­ics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Foot­notes

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

Joce­lyn Bell Bur­nell Dis­cov­ered Radio Pul­sars in 1974, But the Cred­it Went to Her Advi­sor; In 2018, She Gets Her Due, Win­ning a $3 Mil­lion Physics Prize

Hen­ri­et­ta Lacks Gets Immor­tal­ized in a Por­trait: It’s Now on Dis­play at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery

Black His­to­ry in Two Min­utes: Watch 93 Videos Writ­ten & Nar­rat­ed by Hen­ry Louis Gates Jr.

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.