Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology

"US mathematician Gladys Mae West was best known for her foundational work on GPS systems. As an African American woman, West overcame huge barriers to contribute to this key technology. She was one of many women of her generation whose talents helped to propel the mid-twentieth-century cold-war technology boom in the United States. Programming some of the most powerful computers of the time, West pushed the horizons of computation and communication. She has died, aged 95."

"West was born in a farming family in rural Virginia. She excelled in her studies, but because of the Jim Crow laws that barred Black children from the well-funded schools that white students enjoyed, she attended a vocational-training school rather than an academically oriented secondary school. She earned a scholarship to Virginia State College, a historically Black college in Petersburg, where she was one of the few women to study mathematics. West obtained her master's degree there in 1955."

"When she started, she was one of only two Black women and four Black professionals. The double burden of discrimination made West feel like an outsider among both the white women who worked at the centre - whose conversations, she recalled, would often fall silent as she approached - and her male co-workers. She was keenly aware that she should keep her head down and never "allude to the fact she had different ideas". West was unable to travel with her colleagues because of segregation laws and missed out on opportunities as a result."

Gladys Mae West produced precise mathematical models and computations that became foundational to the global positioning system. She grew up in rural Virginia, excelled academically despite Jim Crow segregation, and attended a vocational secondary school before earning a scholarship to Virginia State College, where she completed a master's degree in 1955. West joined the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren as one of only two Black women and four Black professionals, programming powerful computers and conducting classified military research. She faced workplace discrimination, exclusion from travel, and secrecy surrounding her work, yet her computations underpinned GPS technology. She died aged 95.

Read at Nature