12/16/2023 0 Comments Gladys west![]() ![]() "You didn't quite fit in as you did in home economics." West taught for several years after graduation and then accepted a position at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia in 1956 - only the second black woman they had ever hired - analyzing data from satellites.Īt first, that meant math on paper: "We would come in and sit at our desks and we would logic away, go through all the steps anyone would have to do to solve the mathematical problem." But when computers entered the scene, it meant learning how to program - and being ready to catch the computers' mistakes. "You felt a little bit different," she later reflected. There, she became one of only a handful of women studying mathematics. "But then as I got more educated, went into the higher grades, I learned that education was the thing to get me out." West was valedictorian in her high school, which won her a scholarship to attend Virginia State College. I thought that would get me out of the country and out of the fields," she remembers. ![]() "I thought at first I needed to go to the city. West was born on Octoin a rural Virginia community of sharecroppers, but from an early age she had ambition to go beyond farm or factory work. "You’re thinking, ‘I’ve got to get this right.'" Although GPS is ubiquitous today, West says that in the moment, she wasn't thinking about the future: "When you’re working every day, you’re not thinking, ‘What impact is this going to have on the world?’" she says. However, her greatest accomplishment was the creation of an extremely detailed geodetic model of the Earth which became the foundation for the Global Positioning System. Gladys West, like the "human computers" at NASA who became famous with the book Hidden Figures, began her career by performing the complex hand calculations required before the computer age. Air Force's highest honors: induction into the Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame! Dr. If you rely on your GPS for directions, you can thank a mathematician whose little-known contributions to the mathematical modeling of the Earth recently earned her one of the U.S. This trailblazing mathematician built the geodetic model of the Earth that became the foundation for GPS.
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