Gladys West, Mathematician

Gladys West was born in Sutherland, Virginia and grew up in Dinwiddie County, south of Richmond. Her father was a farmer who also worked for the railroad, and her mother was a worker at a tobacco factory. From an early age, Gladys knew that she did not want to follow in her parents’ footsteps and work as a farmer, picking tobacco, corn and cotton or as a factory worker, breaking tobacco leaves into fragments tiny enough for smoking in cigarettes and pipes. She admitted “I realized I had to get an education to get out.”

She graduated from her high school as valedictorian and with this honour, was able to receive a scholarship to Virginia State College, now known as Virginia State University. During her time there, she became a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She was initially unsure of what she wanted to major in and was told by her professors that she should major in math or science as they were more difficult subjects and that ‘meant people didn’t major in them.’ She decided to take their advice and graduated in 1952, with a bachelor of science in mathematics, a field dominated by men. She recalls that she always felt like she didn’t fit in like she could in home economics classes. Most female classmates of hers went on to work as teachers, and Gladys initially followed their example, teaching in Sussex County for 2 years. After a brief venture into teaching, she returned to school for her master’s degree.

She then began to look for opportunities elsewhere and eventually received a call from the naval base in Dahlgren, then known as the ‘Naval Proving Ground’. She started working there in 1956 and was only the second African-American woman ever hired and one of only four black employees. It was here that she met her husband, mathematician Ira West. The two dated for 18 months and were married in 1957.

Gladys was able to accomplish a great deal during her time at the base despite the undeniable prevalence of sexism and racism in her society. In her first project, she was part of a key astronomical study that definitively proved the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune. This phenomena is known as ‘orbital resonance’. In simple terms, Pluto’s orbit is so oval that it actually enters Neptune’s orbit for the duration of 20 years in its 248 path around the Sun. While the two orbits do not actually intersect, the nearness of the two planets can cause their gravitational fields to affect the other’s. Despite this, due to their 2:3 resonance, Neptune and Pluto are never closer than 17 AU (Astronomical Unit = ~93 million miles) This project was cutting-edge; however, it was only one of many incredible works that Gladys was part of throughout her long and ground-breaking career.

Gladys then started working as the project manager on arguably her most impactful project: the Seasat project. This project began as a method to arrive at precise measurements of distances over the Earth’s surface. Gladys collected information from the satellites orbiting the Earth, focusing on data that helped recognise their exact location as they transmitted from around varying locations. Data was then inputted into enormous “supercomputers” that filled entire rooms. With the help of these supercomputers, she worked on creating a computer software that could process geoid heights or precise surface elevations when modelling the Earth as a geoid. A geoid is a model of the world’s average sea level that is utilised to obtain precise surface elevations. Hence, she came up with a Geodetic Satellite that allowed all military services to create computer simulations of Earth’s surface for cutting-edge applications. Her work culminated in June 1986 when she released a guide, titled “Data Processing System Specifications for the GEOSAT Satellite Radar Altimeter,” that explained how to calculate the accuracy of geoid heights using data from the Geodetic Satellite. This work was vital to the creation of modern GPS as the technology is dependent upon the geoid model in order to find the location of a receiver.

Gladys’ department’s head, Ralph Neiman, recommended her for a commendation, citing her ability to work long and hard hours and how her dedication helped cut the processing time in half, which saved the military thousands of dollars. However, this commendation was the only credit Gladys would receive for her incredible work for decades to come.

She retired in 1998 after 42 years at Dahlgren. 5 months after her retirement, she suffered from a stroke that was detrimental to her hearing, vision, and balance. She persevered and began her recovery by taking regular classes at King George YMCA to rebuild her strength. She kept working and finally received her remote PhD in Public Administration in 2018 from the University of Virginia despite a battle with breast cancer and a quadruple bypass in the early 2010s.

Gladys’ importance in shaping modern GPS only came to the forefront when decades later, she sent in a small biography for an event thrown to pay homage to members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. This biography had a small mention of her involvement in the team that laid the foundation for GPS, and this immediately caught the notice of one of her sorority sisters in particular. This sister was determined to help bring attention to Gladys and her story. In 2018, her story was published in the Associated Press, and the US Military then publicly named her as a ‘hidden figure’ of military history in a press release. She was also inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame during a ceremony in her honor at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The Virginia General Assembly commended her achievements and skills, including her “analytical skill and her ability to accurately calculate complex mathematical figures” and her “valuable contributions to the development of the Global Positioning System.”

by Raina Talwar Bhatia

References

Butterly, A. (2018, May 20). The woman who paved the way for GPS. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43812053

Dyson, C. (2018, January 19). Gladys West’s work on GPS ‘would impact the world’. The Free Lance Star. https://fredericksburg.com/features/gladys-west-s-work-on-gps-would-impact-the-world/article_26e82f21-bb5a-5d76-9789-69a5039ad018.html

Glorfeld, J. (2020, April 30). Gladys west maps the future. Cosmos Magazine. https://cosmosmagazine.com/mathematics/gladys-west-maps-the-future/

Karlins, A. (2019, March 6). Gladys west — Mathematician. The Heroine Collective. https://www.theheroinecollective.com/gladys-west/

National Oceanic Service. (2020, April 6). What is the geoid? NOAA’s National Ocean Service. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/geoid.html

Official United States Air Force Website. (2018, December). Mathematician inducted into Space and Missiles Pioneers Hall of Fame. Air Force Space Command > Home. https://www.afspc.af.mil/Portals/3/documents/Pioneers/2018_West.pdf?ver=2019-02-15-160233-693

Reynolds, L. M. (2019, December). Meet Dr. Gladys West, the hidden figure behind your phone’s GPS. Massive Science. https://massivesci.com/articles/science-heroes-gps-hidden-figures-scientist-women-physics-math/