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Mathematician Gladys West dies at 95. She was a hidden figure behind GPS. – Washington Post

by | Feb 2, 2026 | Blog

Image: Gen. David Thompson, USSF, inducting Gladys Mae West into the Space Force Hall of Fame. US DoD photo

What’s new: The passing of an important contributor to GPS and all the benefits we receive from space-based PNT.

Why it’s important: It is important to recognize those who are deserving but not well recognized in the popular conception.

What else to know: We lived in southern Virginia in the 50’s. Her getting hired at Dahlgren in 1956, was an impressive achievement in and of itself.

Gladys West and Sam Smith look over GPS data at Dahlgren 1985, USN photo

Mathematician Gladys West dies at 95. She was a hidden figure behind GPS.

Without the mathematical model that she helped refine, “the extraordinary positioning, navigation, and timing accuracy of GPS would be impossible to achieve.”

By

As a young girl in the Jim Crow-era South, Gladys West passed the time counting fenceposts, dreaming of life beyond her family farm south of Richmond.

Each day, she walked three miles to a segregated one-room schoolhouse with a leaky roof and a solitary, underpaid teacher. And each way, there and back, she counted the fenceposts along the road, discovering that she had an aptitude for numbers that would help her bridge the distance between poverty and opportunity, between a life working in the fields and a career helping society advance beyond its limits.

Dr. West, who died Jan. 17 at 95, used her mathematical skills to become a barrier-breaking researcher for the Navy, mastering a bulky supercomputer known as Stretch while calculating satellite orbits and developing a precise model of the Earth’s surface. Her research laid the groundwork for the Global Positioning System, GPS, a technology that has made getting lost a thing of the past. Thanks in part to Dr. West, anyone with a smartphone — or a receiver-equipped car, airplane or boat — can navigate easily from one place to the next, without having to stop to ask for directions.

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