Mathematical Equation

MATHEMATICIAN | INVENTOR

You probably use the brain of Dr Gladys West everyday, several times a day. Her work is indispensable in daily life, whether it’s walking to a business appointment in a crowded city or a driving across a vast desert.

The earth is in constant motion, with forces that change its shape from one second to the next making the precise location of an object difficult. Dr West created the first geodetic model of Earth and wrote the mathematical equations that permit satellites to continuously provide updated and accurate location data for any object in the world to within 7 meters, with approximately 95% accuracy. The Global Positioning System (GPS) has become indispensable to industry, commerce, government and home. Born in 1930 in rural Virginia, Dr. Gladys West was born the daughter of sharecroppers and worked the fields as a child. She was intelligent, ambitious and worked hard to excel and change her destiny. Dr. West was valedictorian at her segregated high school and received a scholarship to college where she earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics and later received a master’s degree. Breaking racial and gender barriers, in 1956, she got a rare opportunity to work for the US Naval Weapons Laboratory. There she collected data from satellites to pinpoint their exact locations in space. Dr West was the first person to take all of the information on the Earth’s movement and the forces that act upon the Earth and input them into a computer to create a precise mathematical model of our planet. Basically, she became a human computer. Dr. West’s computer program paved the way for pinpointing a person’s location through satellite tracking. This work laid the foundations for GPS.

Dr West earned a second master’s degree in public administration and after retiring earned a Ph.D. in public administration and policy affairs at 70 years old and wrote her autobiography, It Began With A Dream. Dr. Gladys West was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2018, honoring her impact on science and the Air Force space program.