Science and Technology Pioneers

Gladys West, the Virginia-born mathematician whose precise modeling of Earth’s shape and gravity field became a cornerstone of today’s GPS satellite navigation system, has died at age 95, her family announced Saturday. Raised in a one-room segregated schoolhouse in rural Dinwiddie County, she earned a scholarship as high school valedictorian to Virginia State College, then a master’s in math, before joining the U.S. Navy’s Dahlgren proving ground in 1956 as one of its few Black professionals. At Dahlgren she computed satellite orbital trajectories and led work on accurate geodetic models, using complex algorithms to correct for gravitational, tidal and other forces that distort Earth’s figure—work later embedded in the GPS constellation the U.S. military and civilians now rely on. West, who chronicled her life in the memoir "It Began with a Dream," told a 2020 VPM interview that she still preferred paper maps and had little personal use for GPS, even as billions of people came to depend on it. Her story, highlighted in recent years alongside other "hidden figures" of U.S. science and defense, is being widely cited online as a reminder of how Black women’s technical work under Jim Crow quietly underwrote core U.S. infrastructure.