Morrow High School

          Women's History Month Special 

Gladys Brown West - The Women Who Navigated Through The Globe

by Taylor Moore 

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In honor of Women’s History Month, it only makes sense to speak about the woman who made it possible to not only identify the Earth’s shape but helped create the GPS, Gladys Brown West. Gladys was a black woman who is known for her contributions to the mathematical modeling for the shape of the Earth and also for her work on the development of satellite geodesy models. This was later turned into the Global Positioning System also widely known as the GPS System. This is the article of the woman who made navigating through the world possible.

Gladys Mae Brown was born in Sutherland, Virginia in a rural county south of Richmond on October 27, 1930. She was the second eldest of four siblings and spent a great deal of her childhood working on the family farm. Gladys had always seen education as the way of life and while she was in high school, she received a full scholarship to Virginia State University—a historically black public university—. At her university, she chose to study mathematics which was a predominantly all men studied subject. She eventually graduated from the university in 1952 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and went on to teach mathematics and science for 2 years. She then returned to VSU to continue a Master of Mathematics degree, graduating again in 1955.

A year after her graduation, Gladys worked at the Naval Proving Ground as a computer programmer in the Dahlgren division and a project manager for processing systems for satellite data analysis. In the beginning years of the 1960s, she worked on a study that required 5 billion calculations conducted on a mainframe computer to prove the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune. She analyzed the satellite altimeter data from NASA’s Geodetic Earth Orbiting program to be able to make models of the Earth’s shape. According to the U.S. Department of War story, through the 1970s to the 1980s, Gladys programmed an IBM 7030 Stretch computer to deliver accurate numbers for the shape of our globe, an ellipsoid known as the geoid. But to generate precise geopotential models, she needed to use difficult algorithms to account for variations in the gravitational, tidal, and additional forces that distort Earth’s shape. Despite her great contributions, Gladys faced many challenges and hardships because of the racism of Blacks. She speaks about not being recognized by her white peers for the work she did though they received praises and privileges.

In 1986, West wrote and produced the 51-page technical report Data Processing System Specifications for the Geosat Satellite Radar Altimeter. From the report itself, it states, “The radar altimeter data processing system reduces the radar altimeter measurements to best-estimated along-track geoid heights and vertical deflections.” The report expressed in detail how to improve the accuracy of the geoid heights and vertical deflection which are necessary components of satellite geodesy. All of this was possible thanks to the processing of data from the radio altimeter on the Geosat satellite which officially went into orbit on March 12, 1984. In the following decades, the GPS became fully operational and in 2000, then President Clinton got rid of the “Selective Availability” of the system for more accurate usage for citizens. Gladys continued to work at Dahlgren for 42 years, finally retiring in 1988.

During the time that Gladys worked on the Earth, she met her husband Ira West, marrying him and taking his last name. They had 3 children together and 7 grandchildren. After her death in January 2026, her children came out and stated that they didn’t even know about their mother’s contributions in creating the GPS because Gladys never brought her work home with her. Gladys was put into the US Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018 which is one of the highest honors a person can receive by the Air Force Space Command. In the same year, Gladys was named Female Alumna of the Year at the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Awards. To this day, both of Gladys contributions to the Earth are used everyday, no matter by civilians or scientists and mathematicians.