Mathematician Gladys West dies at 95. She was a hidden figure behind GPS

As a young girl in the Jim Crow-era South, Gladys West passed the time counting fenceposts, dreaming of life beyond her family farm south of Richmond.

Each day, she walked three miles to a segregated one-room schoolhouse with a leaky roof and a solitary, underpaid teacher. And each way, there and back, she counted the fenceposts along the road, discovering that she had an aptitude for numbers that would help her bridge the distance between poverty and opportunity, between a life working in the fields and a career helping society advance beyond its limits.

Dr. West, who died Jan. 17 at 95, used her mathematical skills to become a barrier-breaking researcher for the Navy, mastering a bulky supercomputer known as Stretch while calculating satellite orbits and developing a precise model of the Earth’s surface. Her research laid the groundwork for the Global Positioning System, GPS, a technology that has made getting lost a thing of the past. Thanks in part to Dr. West, anyone with a smartphone — or a receiver-equipped car, airplane or boat — can navigate easily from one place to the next, without having to stop to ask for directions

 

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May our wonderful and smart sister rest in peace and power.

 

Considering they just pushed life expectancy here in the USA to 79 years old, getting 95 years is over & above.

 

Thanks for the mathematics contribution. RIP Dr. Gladys West.😎

13 hours ago, ProfD said:

Considering they just pushed life expectancy here in the USA to 79 years old, 

 

And our brother Demond Wilson died at 79.