Gladys West
Her models of the Earth's exact shape became the mathematical foundation of GPS. Every map app, rideshare and delivery on every phone runs on her math.
Gladys West was born in 1930 in rural Dinwiddie County, Virginia, to a farming family. She graduated first in her high school class, earning a scholarship to Virginia State College, and in 1956 became the second Black woman ever hired at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia — where she would work for 42 years.
Her specialty was the geoid: the true, irregular shape of the Earth. Programming room-sized computers, West processed satellite altimeter data and refined the geodetic models that describe exactly where every point on the planet sits. That mathematical model of the Earth is the invisible foundation on which the Global Positioning System calculates position.
Her role stayed unknown for decades — she was, in the truest sense, a hidden figure — until a sorority newsletter mention in 2017 set off her rediscovery. In December 2018 she was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame, one of the highest honors in Air Force space operations. She completed a PhD by distance learning in her seventies.
Why You Should Know Them
GPS is used billions of times a day — every map, every rideshare, every delivery, every dating app radius. Underneath all of it is the mathematics of a Black woman from a Virginia farm whose name was left out of the story for forty years.