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Chris Hall - CSH LLC, Indianapolis, IN (2025)

11/18/2025

11/18/2025

Gladys West (born October 27, 1930, Sutherland, Virginia) is an American mathematician known for her work contributing to the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS).
Gladys Mae Brown was born in rural Virginia, where her parents owned a small farm in an area populated mostly by sharecroppers. Growing up, when not in school, she spent much of her time helping to harvest crops on the family farm, an occupation she knew many of her peers would continue into adulthood. In her community the only clear options for a young Black girl’s future were continuing to farm or working at a tobacco-processing plant.
In 1956 Gladys was hired as a mathematician by the U.S. Naval Proving Ground, a weapons laboratory in Dahlgren, Virginia, as only their fourth Black employee. There she met Ira V. West, another Black mathematician on the base; the couple married in 1957 and had three children. At Dahlgren, Gladys West was admired for her ability to solve complex mathematical equations by hand. She eventually transitioned from solving those equations herself to programming computers to do it for her. One of her first major projects was work on the Naval Ordinance Research Calculator (NORC), an award-winning program designed (via 100 hours of computer calculations, which often had to be double-checked for errors by hand) to determine the movements of Pluto in relation to Neptune.
Like NASA mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, West is often called one of history’s “hidden figures”: individuals, often Black women, whose insightful contributions to science went unrecognized in their time because of their race or gender. In 2018 West was formally recognized for her contribution to the development of GPS by the Virginia General Assembly. That same year she was also inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame and named one of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 100 Women of 2018, a list designed to honour inspiring women worldwide.