Dr. Gladys West, an 87-year-old mathematician who played a major role in the invention of GPS, was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame earlier this month.
According to an Air Force press release, the “hidden figure” and STEM innovator was among a small group of women who did computing for the U.S. military in the era before electronic systems. West was hired in 1956 as a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, where she worked on an award-winning astronomical study that proved the planet Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune.
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During the mid-1970s through the 1980s, she also helped program an IBM 7030 “Stretch” computer that delivered “refined calculations for an extremely accurate geodetic Earth model. This program ended up becoming the Global Positioning System (GPS) orbit.
Source: Dr. Gladys West, The ‘Hidden Figure’ Behind GPS, Inducted Into Air Force Hall Of Fame
