Gladys West

Ablack woman ina field of white men whose ‘elegant’ mathematics helped the world find its bearings with GPS

- Patrick Kidd

Gladys West, pictured in 1985, looks over data from the Global Positioning System (GPS), which she helped develop.

(FM Archive/Alamy)

Gladys West had no sense of where her life’s journey would lead — an irony, perhaps, fora mathematician whose work underpins the navigation systems now guiding the world.

She was born in poverty ona small farm in Virginia, and her early ambitions were to become a teacher ora seamstress, a step up from a life picking cotton or crushing tobacco ina factory, as her mother did.

Education gave her a way out. West wona scholarship to study mathematics at university and then began a 40-year career in US Navy research where her modelling of the Earth’s surface using satellite data would be used in the development of GPS. The results of her work now sit in almost every pocket.

At the time, West had little idea of the significance her research would assume. “When you're working every day, you're not thinking: ‘What impact is this going to have on the world?” she said many years later. “You're thinking: ‘I've got to get this right”

It was not until her late 80s that her contribution was formally recognised when she was inducted into the US Air Force Hall of Fame. However, West was more than a brilliant mathematician. As a black woman in a field dominated by white men, she was a social trailblazer.