GREAT WOMAN OF MATHEMATICS: DR. GLADYS MAE WEST, born 1930. Pioneer responsible for the mathematics behind GPS. Growing up in rural Virginia, she saw how hard the lives of her parents, a tobacco farm and railroad worker, respectively, were and determined to find a way 1/8 #GWOM

to access education to improve her life and the lives of her family. She graduated as high school valedictorian, an accomplishment that earned her a full scholarship to Virginia State University, an HBCU. She majored in mathematics because of its rigor and difficulty, earning 2/8

both bachelor's and master's degrees. In 1956, she began work at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. She was one of only four black employees and saw herself as holding the duty to be a role model. "Always doing things just right, to set an example for other people who were 3/8

coming behind me, especially women." A lifetime learner, she earned a second master's degree, in public administration, while working. In the early 1960s, she helped prove the regularity of Pluto's motion relative to Neptune. For much of the next 20 years, she would work with 4/8

data from satellites. She was project manager for Seasat radar altimetry project, the first satellite to remotely sense oceans, earning a commendation in 1979. She programmed computers to produce calculations that modeled Earth's geoid shape, requiring the use of extremely 5/8

complex algorithms and the manual checking of computer results by herself and other mathematicians. "9 times out of 10 they weren't completely right so you had to analyse them and find out what was different to what you expected." She married a coworker, Ira West, and they 6/8

raised three children--and are still married, 62 years later! She was honored by the US Air Force in 2018 with induction into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame, one of the highest honors the US Air Force can bestow on a civilian. She and Ira retired in 7/8

1998, but not from learning--she earned a PhD in 2018, at age 87! Despite literally "doing the maths" for GPS, Dr. West uses paper maps when she and Ira travel, since she trusts her brain most and some data points could be outdated from when she worked on the equations. /end