The character arc of Gladys West

Who was Gladys West?

She saw education as the way out. She was right, at scale.

She was the second of four children in an African American farming family in a sharecropping community south of Richmond. She spent much of her childhood working on the family small farm; her mother worked in a tobacco factory and her father worked for the railroad. She saw education as her way to a different life, and at her high school the top two students in each graduating class received full scholarships to Virginia State College. She graduated valedictorian in 1948 and took the scholarship.

At Virginia State she chose mathematics, a subject mostly studied by men, and graduated in 1952. She taught mathematics and science for two years in Waverly, went back for a masters in mathematics in 1955, and took another teaching post in Martinsville. In 1956 she was hired at the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren, as the second Black woman hired there and one of only four Black employees. She met her husband Ira there, another mathematician and another of those four. They married in 1957.

She worked as a programmer and as a project manager for the systems that processed satellite data, and took a second masters, in public administration, at the same time. In the early 1960s she was part of an award-winning study that proved the regularity of Pluto motion relative to Neptune: five billion calculations, on a mainframe that ran on punched cards. She then began analysing satellite altimeter data to model the shape of the Earth, became project manager of Seasat, the first satellite that could remotely sense oceans, cut her team processing time in half, and was recommended for a commendation in 1979.

From the mid-1970s through the 1980s she programmed an IBM 7030 Stretch to deliver increasingly precise calculations of the geoid, the true shape of the Earth, an ellipsoid with undulations, which meant algorithms accounting for gravitational, tidal and other forces that pull the planet out of round. In 1986 she published a fifty one page technical report specifying how to process the data from a radar altimeter satellite. That body of work was later incorporated into the Global Positioning System.

She worked at Dahlgren for forty two years and retired in 1998. In 2000 she completed a PhD in public administration at Virginia Tech, by distance learning, at about seventy. The civil rights movement ran through her whole time at the base and she supported it, but as a government employee she could not join the protests, so she was part of a club of Black women on base who discussed it instead. In 2018 she was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame, named Female Alumna of the Year at the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Awards, and selected by the BBC as one of its hundred women; in 2021 the Royal Academy of Engineering gave her the Prince Philip Medal, its highest individual honour. Her own account of the work is characteristic: when you are working every day you are not thinking what impact this will have on the world, you are thinking you have got to get it right.

The moments

Gladys West's timeline.

Gladys West: frequently asked questions

What people ask about her line.

Sources

• Gladys West, English Wikipedia biography.
• Data Processing System Specifications for the Geosat Satellite Radar Altimeter, 1986.
• The Air Force Space Command press release on her induction, 2018.
• Her own words on the work, as quoted there.