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. |
Gladys Mae West is an American mathematician known for her contributions to the mathematical modelling of the shape of the Earth and was one of the team of mathematicians who worked on the development of the satellite geodesy models that were eventually incorporated into the Global Positioning System. In 1956 West began to work at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, where she was the second black woman ever to be employed. She was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018, one of the Air Force Space Command's highest honors. She was one of the women who did mathematical computing for the United States Armed Forces before electronic systems.
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