Gladys West navigated segregation to become an esteemed mathematician — and today, her work helps billions of people navigate the world.
Gladys West, whose pioneering career contributed key elements to what became the GPS satellite system and was later acknowledged as a “hidden figure” of GPS, died Saturday at age 95.
West “passed peacefully alongside her family and friends and is now in heaven with her loved ones,” her family said as they announced her death.
West is credited with astounding accomplishments in mathematics, playing pivotal roles in charting orbital trajectories and creating accurate mathematical models of the Earth’s shape that would eventually be used by the GPS satellite orbit.
But, as West admitted to member station VPM in 2020, she did not really rely on the groundbreaking system she helped create.
“I would say minimal,” she replied when asked if she used GPS. “I prefer maps.”
‘A commitment to be the best I could be’
Born Gladys Mae Brown in 1930, West grew up in the Jim Crow Era, on a small farm in Dinwiddie County, Va., south of Richmond. She attended a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher, and in her memoir, It Began with a Dream, West wrote of the aspirations that grew during those 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 fly away from the strenuous and seemingly never-ending work on our family farm.”
Realizing that education could open doors to a new life, West added, “I made a commitment to be the best I could be and absorb as much knowledge that a little farm girl could handle.”
As she neared graduation in her segregated high school, teachers urged her to pursue a degree in mathematics.
“If you had left it to me, I would have majored in home economics,” she told VPM.
“I really did like geometry,” she added. “I fell in love with that.”
But first West, daughter of farmers who also worked jobs in a tobacco factory and for the railroad, would have to figure out a path to attending college.
“When she learned that the top senior in 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 Notices 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 math and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She then taught math and science in segregated schools in Virginia, earning her master’s degree in 1955 — the same year President Dwight Eisenhower banned racial discrimination in federal hiring.
Seeing limitations — and opportunities to overcome them
One year later, West was offered a job in Dahlgren, Va., at the Naval Proving Ground, which later became the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division.
“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 position.”
One of the other professionals was Ira West, a mathematician; the pair married in 1957.
“I met her at a lunch break,” Ira West told VPM in 2020, recalling what his future wife was wearing: a pleated blue skirt and a white blouse.
“When I first saw her, I knew there was something 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 at the naval program for 42 years. In a 2021 interview, she said two things helped her cope with the limitations imposed by racism: She enjoyed her work; and she wanted more Black people to get a chance to do it.
Courtesy of NPR-KERA By Bill Chappell