Gladys West, mathematician whose work helped enable GPS, dies at 95

Dr. Gladys West, a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory whose modeling of the Earth’s shape contributed to the development of the global positioning system, died on Jan. 17 in Fredericksburg, Va. She was 95 and lived with her daughter, Carolyn West Oglesby. Her work at the Dahlgren, Va., facility was long carried out in near anonymity.

“Dr. West’s mathematics really did lay the foundation for the global positioning system to be built,” D. Sarah Stamps, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech, said in an interview. The article said she was almost 90 before she received any recognition for her contributions. Dr. West joined the Navy weapons facility in 1956 and was one of four Black employees there.

Her early duties included using a hand calculator to verify bombing tables. Later she helped program computers to run billions of calculations tracking planetary motion and led a team using an IBM 7030 to calculate the precise shape of the Earth; those calculations were incorporated into the World Geodetic System used by GPS, the article said.

Bradford Parkinson, the Air Force colonel who led the development of GPS, said the orbit calculations reflect that accumulated knowledge. Her role remained largely unknown until an alumna at a 2018 sorority event helped publicize her story and a local newspaper article drew wider attention.