Gladys West, the mathematician whose work helped shape the Global Positioning System (GPS), died on January 20 at age 95. Born in 1930 in rural Virginia, West grew up picking crops on her family's farm and walked miles to a one-room schoolhouse. Despite facing racial discrimination, she earned a scholarship to Virginia State College after discovering geometry.
West taught math and science in segregated schools before earning a master's degree in mathematics. She joined the US Navy at the Naval Proving Ground in Virginia after President Dwight Eisenhower banned racial discrimination in federal hiring in 1955. There, she built the mathematics to account for Earth's gravitational irregularities, including tidal forces and the planet's oblate spheroid shape.
Working with primitive computers, West coded algorithms into zeros and ones on punched cards and fed them into a computer the size of a bus. Her work ensured that GPS satellites could account for Earth's bulges and irregularities, enabling accurate navigation. Ironically, West preferred using maps over GPS.
