Dinwiddie Graduate in Military Hall of Fame

In August of 2018, Air Force Space Command vice commander Lt. Gen. David Thompson presented Dr. Gladys West with the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers award for her decades of contributions to the Air Force’s space program. While West was unable to attend the formal induction ceremony, she was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame during a ceremony in her honor at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., December 6, 2018.

Dr. Gladys West is among a small group of women who did computing for the U.S.  military in the era before electronic systems.  Hired in 1956 as a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, she participated in a path-breaking, award-winning astronomical study that proved, during the early 1960s, the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune.  Thereafter, from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, using complex algorithms to account for variations in gravitational, tidal, and other forces that distort Earth’s shape, she programmed an IBM 7030 “Stretch” computer to deliver increasingly refined calculations for an extremely accurate geodetic Earth model, a geoid, optimized for what ultimately became the Global Positioning System (GPS) orbit.

Dr. Gladys Mae West grew up in the Sutherland area of Dinwiddie County as one of four children on a family farm. Born in 1930, she knew what hard work was and decided that she did not want to work on a farm all her life.  She was always good in school and when she heard that any person that graduated high school as valedictorian or salutatorian could get a scholarship she decide that was her opportunity to get out and further education.  And that is just what she did!  Dr. West said in an interview, “I can do it. I can. I can really do that. At that point I decided to put more effort in studies.” She went to Virginia State University (then College) on a full tuition academic scholarship.

“I can do it. I can. I can really do that. At that point I decided to put more effort in studies.”
—  Dr. Gladys Mae West

Dr. West received her Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics in four years.  She completed her Master’s degree in 1956 and was hired at Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground as the second African-American woman to be hired there.  During the 1950s and 1960s, she worked on the calculations as a mathematician which led to the foundation of the GPS system today.  At the time she was starting out at Dahlren, they were in the process of bring in a large computer.  Dr. West along with other mathematicians had to learn to program and code for this computer although no one had had any computer teaching or knowledge at that point.  “My part in the global positioning system would be working more working with orbit over the water. A lot goes into the scientific computation to generate an orbit, which is a database used in GPS. So the different people who did civilian applications learned to use the database that we generated and that was the foundation that GPS was built on.”

“My part in the global positioning system would be working more working with orbit over the water. A lot goes into the scientific computation to generate an orbit, which is a database used in GPS. So the different people who did civilian applications learned to use the database that we generated and that was the foundation that GPS was built on.”
—   Dr. Gladys Mae West

We thank Dr. Gladys Mae West for her contributions she has made and through her dedication to lifelong learning she has become an inspiration to us all!

 

 

Sources:

“Navy Hidden Hero: Gladys Mae West and GPS.” YouTube, uploaded by US Navy, 19 December 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McIemoQWv64
“A Conversation with Dr. Gladys West – GPS Developer.” YouTube, uploaded by Ray Rose, 07 November 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=FWrDWLAWo5I&feature=emb_logo
“Mathematician inducted into Space and Missiles Pioneers Hall of Fame.” Air Force Space Command, 07 December 2018, https://www.afspc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1707464/mathematician-inducted-into-space-and-missiles-pioneers-hall-of-fame/