Gladys West, GPS pioneer and mathematician, dies at 95 : NPR

Gladys West went from a one-room schoolhouse in rural Virginia to college and working on planetary motions and modeling. “I really liked geometry,” she said of her high school years. “I fell in love with it.”

Courtesy of the West family

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Courtesy of the West family

She rose through segregation to become an esteemed mathematician – and today her work helps billions of people navigate the world.

Gladys West, whose pioneering career contributed to key elements of what became the GPS satellite system and who was later recognized as a “hidden figure” in GPS, died Saturday at the age of 95.

West “passed away peacefully alongside her family and friends and is now in heaven with her loved ones,” her family said in announcing her death.

West is credited with astonishing achievements in mathematics, playing a central role in mapping orbital trajectories and creating precise mathematical models of the Earth’s shape that would eventually be used by the GPS satellite’s orbit.

But, as West admitted to member station VPM in 2020, she hasn’t really relied on the revolutionary system she helped create.

“I would say minimal,” she said when asked if she used GPS. “I prefer cards.”

“A commitment to being the best we can be”

Born Gladys Mae Brown in 1930, West grew up during the Jim Crow era, on a small farm in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, south of Richmond. She attended a one-room schoolhouse with just one teacher and, in her memoir, It all started with a dream, West wrote about the aspirations that grew during these early years.

“Every day I wished and dreamed of having more: more books, more classrooms, more teachers, and more time to dream and imagine what life would be like if only I could get away from the hard, seemingly endless work of our family farm.”

Realizing that education could open doors to a new life, West added, “I committed to being the best I could be and absorbing as much knowledge as a little farm girl could manage.”

As she neared graduation from her segregated high school, teachers urged her to pursue a degree in mathematics.

“If you had let me, I would have majored in home economics,” she told VPM.

“I really liked geometry,” she added. “I fell in love with it.”

But West, the daughter of farmers who also worked in a tobacco factory and for the railroad, would first have to find a path to attend college.

“When she learned that the top high school senior at her high school was guaranteed a scholarship to college, she was motivated to earn that spot and successfully became valedictorian of her class,” according to a profile of West in Notice of the American Mathematical Society.

West used that scholarship to attend Virginia State College – an HBCU now known as Virginia State University – where she studied mathematics and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She later taught math and science in segregated Virginia schools, earning her master’s degree in 1955 – the same year President Dwight Eisenhower banned racial discrimination in federal hiring.

In her work for the U.S. Army, Gladys West “used complex algorithms to account for variations in gravitational forces, tides, and other forces that distort the shape of the Earth,” according to the Department of Defense.

US Navy

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US Navy

Seeing limitations – and opportunities to overcome them

A year later, West was offered a job in Dahlgren, Virginia, at the Naval Proving Ground, which later became the Dahlgren Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center.
“There were three other black professionals,” West recalled to VPM. “We were respectful to the leaders and tried to treat them the way we wanted them to treat us if we were in the same situation.”

One of the other professionals was Ira West, a mathematician; the couple married in 1957.

“I met her on a lunch break,” Ira West told VPM in 2020, recalling what his future wife wore: a pleated blue skirt and white blouse.

“When I first saw it, I knew there was something in it for me,” he said. “But she didn’t know there was something for her in looking at me.”

The couple had three children and seven grandchildren; Ira West died in 2024.

Gladys West worked in the naval program for 42 years. In a 2021 interview, she said two things helped her cope with the limitations imposed by racism: she loved her work; and she wanted more black people to have the chance to do so.

“I always felt a real responsibility to be the best and do my best,” she told the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, adding that by setting a positive example, she hoped to undermine discrimination.

“I always felt that I would do my best no matter what happened, that I would give my best because I respected myself very well.”

Massive computers produced modeling data used for GPS

West’s work developed alongside enormous advances in computing. She began her career at a time when advanced computing meant that researchers’ ideas had to be encoded as zeros and ones, etched onto cards and fed into enormous machines.

“Sometimes they would call you to see if you wanted to look at it, to see if it exploded or if it went away,” West told Notices of the American Mathematical Society in 2020. She added: “Those were the good old days; it’s a lot easier now.”

Here’s how the Department of Defense summarizes some of West’s critical work:

In the early 1960s, she participated in an award-winning astronomical study that proved the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune.

From the mid-1970s until the 1980s, West used complex algorithms to account for variations in gravitational forces, tides, and other forces that distort the shape of the Earth. She programmed the IBM 7030 computer, also known as Stretch, to provide increasingly refined calculations for a highly accurate model of the Earth’s shape, optimized for what eventually became the GPS orbit used by satellites.

Without his work and subsequent updates, extremely precise GPS navigation and timing would not have been possible, according to the US Space Force.

No more “hidden figures”

For most of her life, West’s abilities and accomplishments were not widely known — like other black women doing crucial work in science and mathematics during the Cold War and highlighted in the 2016 book, Hidden characters. But West has received notable honors over the past decade, including the Army Space and Missile Pioneer Hall of Fame in 2018 and the National Surface Maritime Museum’s Freedom of Exploration and Innovation Award in 2023. She also became the first woman to win the Prince Philip Medal, awarded by the United Kingdom’s Royal Academy of Engineering.

Speaking to VPM in 2020, West offered advice to young people facing adversity.

“You can give up and cause yourself a lot of stress, or you can take what you have and make the most of it,” she said. “Do your best, work hard – all kinds of things that make you proud – and be a really good person.”

Despite the hardships of her childhood and the effects of racism on her career, West said she believes she has accomplished all she can.

“I’m pretty happy that I wore out,” she said with a smile.