Gladys West, a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory whose modeling of the Earth’s shape played a critical role in the development of GPS, the global satellite mapping system that pilots, firefighters and drivers use to get where they’re going, died on Jan. 17 in Fredericksburg, Va. She was 95.
Dr. West lived with her daughter, Carolyn West Oglesby, and died at her home.
Born to Black farmers in rural Virginia, Dr. West lived through remarkable societal and technological transformations — from segregation to the civil rights movement, from calculators to supercomputers, and from paper maps to Google Maps.
Through it all, she worked in near obscurity. She was almost 90 before she received any recognition for her work.
“Dr. West’s mathematics really did lay the foundation for the global positioning system to be built,” D. Sarah Stamps, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech, said in an interview. “She made the world more precise for all of us.”
Dr. West joined the Navy’s weapons facility in Dahlgren, Va., in 1956, a year after President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an executive order banning racial discrimination in federal workplaces. As one of four Black employees at the site — along the Lower Potomac River about 50 miles south of Washington — her first job entailed using a hand calculator to verify the accuracy of bombing tables.
“When you are one of the first to get an opportunity like I was given, you are a trailblazer for all who will follow you,” Dr. West wrote in her autobiography, “It Began With a Dream” (2020, with M.H. Jackson). “You must prove that you not only could carry out your responsibilities satisfactorily but go beyond what is expected and perform at a high level.”
She advanced quickly. In the early 1960s, she was part of a team that programmed a computer to run five billion calculations in tracking the motion of Pluto relative to Neptune, seeking to better understand planetary orbits.
After that, she led a group of mathematicians in using an IBM 7030 — known as Stretch, one of the most powerful computers of its time — to calculate the precise shape of Earth, accounting for gravitational variations, tidal forces and the curvature of oceans.
Government scientists developing GPS in the early 1970s then incorporated those calculations into the mathematical framework of the still widely used World Geodetic System, which enables GPS satellites to pinpoint precise locations on the planet’s surface.
“We don’t realize that when we use our cellphones or a more sophisticated GPS receiver, that the orbit being calculated reflects all of that knowledge,” Bradford Parkinson, the Air Force colonel who led the development of GPS, said in an interview. “The better that knowledge is, the better we know where satellites are, the better we know where we are.”
Dr. West wasn’t acknowledged by scientific organizations for her role in developing GPS; she remained a hidden figure, even after the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures,” based on a best-selling nonfiction book of the same title, celebrated the role of Black women in the NASA space program.
Then, almost by accident, her story surfaced.
In 2018, Dr. West attended an event for her college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and mentioned on a biographical form that she had helped with the invention of GPS. Gwen James, a fellow alumna who had known Dr. West for years, was floored.
“I had absolutely no idea about any of it,” she said in an interview. “I thought, ‘Here was another hidden figure.’”
After the event, Ms. James offered to help Dr. West get her story publicized.
“Do you think anybody would care?” she replied.
Ms. James contacted Dr. West’s daughter, telling her she thought it was important that her mother’s story finally be told.
“What story?” her daughter said.
It turned out that Dr. West had never even spoken about her job to her children. For one thing, the work was classified. Even as GPS devices emerged in the early 1990s, she was of the generation of women who didn’t brag about their careers, however interesting they might have been.
“They just went along and did their work,” Ms. James said. “They didn’t expect anything in return.”
Ms. James contacted a reporter for The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg to share Dr. West’s story. The newspaper’s subsequent article generated attention from around the world.
Then came the honors.
In 2018, Dr. West received the Air Force’s Space and Missile Pioneers Award. Three years later, she was the first woman to be awarded the Prince Philip Medal by the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. The National Center of Women’s Innovations created a traveling museum exhibit detailing her life.
“I didn’t brag about what I was working on,” Dr. West told The Guardian in 2020. “But to see other people so excited about it, that was amazing.”
Gladys Mae Brown was born on Oct. 27, 1930, in Sutherland, Va., a town of sharecroppers about 30 miles south of Richmond. Her parents, Nolan and Macy (Scott) Brown, owned a tobacco farm.
Gladys was one of four children. Growing up, she walked three miles to and from a segregated school. In the evenings and on sweltering weekends, she helped harvest tobacco on the farm.
At school, she excelled at geometry.
“I was starting to realize early that this newly found love for geometry was something that could help me find that road I had dreamed about, the road that would take me far away from that farm,” she wrote.
Gladys was her high school class valedictorian and won a full academic scholarship to Virginia State College (now University), a historically Black school in Petersburg. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1952 and a master’s degree in 1955, both in mathematics.
While teaching high school math in Martinsville, a city near the southern Virginia border, Dr. West applied for a job at the naval base in Dahlgren. After reviewing her academic records and recommendation letters, officials invited her for an interview. She turned it down, fearing she might be rejected when they saw she was Black.
A few weeks later, she received a letter saying that she had been hired anyway. “My only thought was, if they were offering me a job in the United States government based solely on my qualifications, this must be God’s plan for me,” Dr. West wrote.
After retiring in 1998, she went back to college, earning a doctorate from Virginia Tech in public administration in 2000.
She married Ira West, one of the four Black mathematicians at Dahlgren, in 1957. He died in 2024.
In addition to her daughter, Dr. West is survived by two sons, David and Michael; seven grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
Even after GPS devices became ubiquitous, Dr. West still preferred paper maps.
“I’m a doer, hands-on kind of person,” she told The Guardian. “If I can see the road and see where it turns and see where it went, I am more sure.”
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