Women's Day Spotlight: You’d Be Lost Without Her - Meeting Gladys West, the Mathematician Who Created GPS

Before your phone could bossily demand you "make a legal U-turn," a mathematician from rural Virginia had to literally measure the earth. Mostly by hand. She didn't just write an app. She did something way harder. Born in 1930, West essentially mapped the exact shape of the Earth. Which, spoiler alert, isn't a perfect sphere. It’s a lumpy, irregular potato of a planet. To make GPS work, you need a flawless mathematical model of this lumpiness. In 1956, she walked into the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. She was one of only four Black employees at the facility. While the rest of the world was hyper-fixated on the Space Race, she was quietly, painstakingly crunching astronomical data.  Day after day. For years. She programmed an early IBM computer to account for gravity, tides, and all the weird physical forces that distort our planet's shape. It was grueling, mind-bending work. ...

Devyani

• 2 days ago
• 2 minutes read