Gladys West

Hello! My name is Gladys West. I want to tell you my story. I was born on October 27th, 1930, in a small town in Virginia. My family were sharecroppers, which meant we worked on a farm but didn't own it. It was hard work, especially under the hot sun, picking corn, cotton, and tobacco. I knew from a young age that I didn't want to spend my life farming. I wanted something different for my future. My ticket to a new life was through books and learning. I loved school more than anything, and I decided I would work as hard as I could to get a good education.

I knew that if I wanted to go to college, I had to be the very best student. In my county, the top two students from each high school got a full scholarship to college, and I was determined to be one of them. I studied day and night, focusing on my lessons instead of playing outside. When I graduated from high school in 1948, all my hard work paid off. I was the valedictorian—the number one student in my entire class. I won the scholarship and went to Virginia State College, which was a historically Black college. I decided to study mathematics because I was good at it, and I knew it was a subject that would open doors for me. It was a subject mostly studied by men back then, but I didn't let that stop me from pursuing my passion.

After finishing my master's degree in math, I got a job in 1956 at a place called the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. It was a very important place where the U.S. Navy did scientific work with weapons and technology. When I started, I was one of only four Black employees, and one of only two Black women. My job was to work with giant computers that were the size of whole rooms. These early computers couldn't do things on their own. I would collect data from satellites that were orbiting the Earth and then write computer programs to help solve complicated math problems. It was also where I met another mathematician named Ira West. We became good friends, and I married him a year later in 1957.

In the 1970s and 1980s, I took on a very big project. I became the project manager for a satellite called Seasat. Our important job was to measure the exact shape of the Earth from space. You see, our planet isn't a perfect, smooth ball like you see in pictures. It has bumps and dips because of mountains, valleys, and deep ocean trenches. This overall shape is called a 'geoid.' My team and I used the Seasat satellite to gather tons of information about the height of the ocean's surface. With all that data, we built a very detailed and accurate mathematical model of the Earth. This work was super important. It became the foundation for a technology I bet you use all the time: the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

For a long, long time, almost no one knew about the work I had done. I was a quiet person who just focused on doing my job well. I retired in 1998 after working for the Navy for 42 years. I was just proud of my work and didn't need a lot of attention. But then, a member of my sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, was reading a short biography about me for an event and realized my huge contribution to GPS. She helped share my story with the world. In 2018, I was officially honored for my work and inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. It was a very proud day for me and my family.

Even though I'm no longer working on satellites, my work is all around you. Every time your family uses a map on their phone to find their way to a new place or a restaurant, you're using the GPS technology that I helped make possible. My calculations helped make that system accurate. I am so happy that my love for math helped people all over the world connect and explore. I hope my story inspires you to follow your dreams, work hard in school, and know that you can achieve anything you set your mind to, no matter where you start from.