It was a short paragraph in her sorority’s alumni booklet that shined a light on one of America’s leading mathematicians whose work, like that of so many accomplished Black women, was hidden away for decades.
Its impact, however, is felt every time you ask Siri for directions, tag a photo on Instagram or scope out a house for sale on Google Earth.
Gladys Mae Brown was born in 1930 in rural Dinwiddie County, Virginia. Hers was a sharecropper community, dotted with tobacco fields and farms; her mother worked at a local tobacco factory, while her father farmed and was employed by the railroad.
From an early age, Gladys saw education as her ticket out. She earned top grades in school, and as her high school class valedictorian in 1948 received a full scholarship to attend Virginia State College (now University), an historically black public university. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree and taught science and math for two years before returning for her masters in mathematics, which she received in 1955.
After another year of teaching, in 1956 Gladys was hired as a mathematician at the Naval Proving Ground (now the Naval Surface Warfare Center) in Dahlgren, Virginia. She was only the second Black woman ever hired, and one of just four Black employees at the time. (Her husband, Ira West, whom she met at Dahlgren, was another mathematician in the group of four. The two married in 1957 and raised three children.)
Gladys’s early work involved analyzing satellite data, at first doing calculations by hand, then as a programmer on large scale computers, and finally project manager for data processing systems that did the same analysis. At the same time, she earned a second masters degree in public administration from the University of Oklahoma.
In the early 1960s, Gladys worked on an award-winning astronomical study that confirmed Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune. (Did you know that for every two orbits Pluto makes, Neptune makes three?) The study confirmed what astronomers had observed of the planets for thousands of years.
Gladys was next named project manager of the Seasat radar altimetry project, the first satellite able to remotely sense oceans. The project was a continuation of her early work at Dahlgren, when Gladys was one of the first mathematicians to account for the fluctuations of ocean levels in calculating distance. (Before, most analysis considered static measurements that discounted the effects of water, which makes up more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface.)
She was able to cut her team’s processing time in half, and in 1979 was recommended for a commendation for the project.
Next up, Gladys focused on programming IBM computers to calculate an accurate model of the Earth. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, Gladys and her teams used information from Seasat and other satellites to develop complex algorithms that took into account tidal and gravitational forces, among others, that distort the Earth’s shape. The result was a mathematical model of the actual shape of the earth, including surface fluctuations (a geoid, to be precise).
This data became the basis for the Global Positioning System (GPS) used today.
Gladys retired in 1998 after 42 years at Dahlgren. Five months later she suffered a stroke, but after recovering she completed her PhD in public administration from Virginia Tech in 2018.
Despite her achievements and 42-year military career, Gladys West’s work went unrecognized until 2018, when an Alpha Kappa Alpha sister read the short biography Gladys had submitted for an alumni function. The Associated Press wrote an article on her role in developing GPS, and US Air Force Command issued a press release about her work, calling her a “hidden figure” of military history.
She was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2018, and was honored by the Virginia State Senate that same year. At the Hall of Fame ceremony, Gladys spoke to the legacy of her work in today’s world:
“When you’re working every day, you’re not thinking, ‘What impact is this going to have on the world?’,” she said. “You’re thinking, ‘I’ve got to get this right.’”
Today, Gladys prefers paper maps and her own hand-written calculations to the GPS technology she pioneered. She says she trusts her mind above all.