Gladys West: The Poor Farm Girl Who Invented The GPS Database After Becoming A Mathematician, Her Life Journey

• Gladys West grew up in rural Virginia in the US where her poor family owned a small farm
• She completed high school as the valedictorian and gained full scholarship to pursue a mathematics degree at the Virginia State University
• The database that led to the invention of the Global Positioning System (GPS) was built by Gladys West and her team, who worked for U.S Naval Weapons Laboratory

Gladys grew up on a country farm in rural Virginia, US and understood the importance of hard work, but for her, being a farm girl was just not enough. She wanted more for her life. She believed that channeling the hard work culture she had been raised with into academics was the only gateway to building a better future for herself. The result of that was becoming a part of the team that developed the Global Positioning System (GPS), currently used across the world.

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Her family was poor and was in no position to fund her college education, but Gladys was ambitious and was unwilling to settle for less. Her initial plan was to leave her town for a big city when she was much older and hope she would make it, but as she moved further in her education, she found out her high school was ready to offer scholarships to the two best graduating students.

"When I learned about this, I told myself I did not like working outside from sunrise to sunset, so I worked hard and got good grades in all my subjects. I ended up graduating as the best student", she shared in a video.

Her excellent academic performance earned her a full scholarship to study at the Virginia State College, now known as Virginia State University.

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Gladys West pursuing a Mathematics degree at the Virginia State University

Now, she had a college to attend and a scholarship in hand, but then came the dilemma of what to choose as a major in school given that she was good all round. With the assistance of her high school teachers, she settled on Mathematics.

"They told me since I was good at all my subjects, I should major in science or mathematics or something that was more difficult and meant people did not major in it", she revealed.

Being one of the very few women in her class was not an easy position to be in. Gladys had to constantly compete with her male colleagues to survive the program and emerge among the best. Nevertheless, at the end of her four years of studies, the brilliant young lady graduated as the best student in her class in 1952.

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Like many of the ladies in her class, Gladys took up a teaching job after her first degree since all her attempts at getting jobs in the government field were unsuccessful; the roles were awarded to white men instead, britannica.com reported.

She later returned to school and pursued her master's degree in Mathematics, graduating in 1955.

Getting hired as a Mathematician by the U.S Naval Weapons Laboratory in Dahlgren, Virginia

Gladys West, being the driven woman she is, did not give up on landing a government job, although she had been rejected countless times. In 1956, she finally got an offer to work with the US Naval Weapons Laboratory in Dahlgren, Virginia.

Her hire made her the second black woman and the fourth black employee the laboratory ever engaged. One of the black mathematicians, Ira V. West, became her husband a year later.

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The entrance of Gladys into her new workspace coincided with the introduction of large computer usage by the US Naval Weapons Laboratory. By that time, Gladys and her colleagues had no prior knowledge of the usage of such computers, and they had to learn everything from scratch, including coding and programming.

The role of Gladys West in the invention of the Global Positioning System (GPS)

Gladys West became a project manager for an experimental U.S. ocean surveillance satellite called SEASAT in 1978. This was the very first earth-orbiting satellite designed for sensing the earth’s oceans remotely. It was used to measure ocean depths and to provide other data such as wave height, water temperature, and currents, among others, blackpast.org reported.

Through Gladys' first project, SEASAT, another project called GEOSAT was birthed. It was a programmed satellite that made it possible for computers to account for gravity, tides, and other forces that act on the earth's surface. Eventually, a model called geoid was birthed and after many updates, this brought about a Global Positioning System (GPS) that makes accurate calculations of any place on the surface of the earth.

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"My team and I are not responsible for the GPS used in cars, but we created a database which captured the accuracy of where things were located all around the world.

We came up with various scientific computations to generate orbits which are the database used in GPS. Individuals then learnt how to use the generated database and that was the foundation that GPS was built on", Gladys revealed in an interview.

Gladys West's life after retiring as mathematician for the U.S. Naval Proving Ground

At the age of 68, Glady went on retirement in 1998 after working for over 40 years but that was not all for her; she went ahead to enroll in a PhD program in public administration and policy affairs at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, having already acquired a master's in that field sometime back in her career.

She successfully graduated in 2000 at the age of 70, and from then onwards, she made it her life's mission to inspire the younger generation by speaking with students about the importance of STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

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Gladys's contributions to the world through her in-depth knowledge of mathematics were unknown to the public until 2018. Gwen James, a member of a female group they joined in school, came across a short biography Gladys had submitted for an alumni function and after reading it and seeing what Gladys had achieved, she brought it to light.

"GPS has changed the lives of everyone forever. There is not a segment of this global society; military, auto industry, cell phone industry, social media, parents, NASA, that does not utilize the Global Positioning System.

I think her story is amazing", Gwen said in an interview.

That same year, she was inducted into the US Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame and named one of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 100 Women of 2018.

The role Gladys played in developing the Global Positioning System was described by Capt. Godfrey Weekes, a former commanding officer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division as such;

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“She rose through the ranks, worked on satellite geodesy, and contributed to GPS accuracy and satellite data measurement.

As Gladys West started her career as a mathematician at Dahlgren in 1956, she likely had no idea that her work would impact the world for decades to come”, he said in an interview.

Gladys West has three wonderful children with her husband, whom, as of February 2018, lived with in King George County, Virginia, USA. In addition, the couple is blessed with seven grandchildren.

In an interview, Gladys encouraged all students to take an interest in STEM education and to never stop dreaming big because the sky is no longer the limit.

Source: YEN.com.gh