Gladys Mae West was born in rural Virginia in 1930, grew up working on a tobacco farm, and died earlier this month a celebrated mathematician whose work made possible the GPS technology most of us use every day. Hers was a distinctively American life, in additional methods than one. Searching an escape from the agricultural labor she’d already receivedten to know all too effectively, she received a scholarship to Virginia State College by becoming her highschool class valedictorian; after earning her bachelor’s and master’s levels in mathematics, she taught for a time after which utilized for a job on the naval base up in Dahlgren. She first distinguished herself there by verifying the accuracy of bombing tables with a hand calculator, and from there moved on as much as the computer professionalgramming staff.
This was the early 9teen-sixties, when professionalgramming a computer meant not coding, however laboriously feeding punch playing cards into an enormous importantbody. West and her colleagues used IBM’s first transistorized machine, the 7030 (or “Stretch”), which was for a couple of years the quickest computer on the earth.
It price an equivalent of $81,860,000 in right now’s dollars, however no other computer had the power to handle the undertaking of calculating the precise form of Earth as have an effect oned by gravity and the character of the oceans. A couple of decade later, another staff of government scientists made use of these exact same calculations when placing together the model employed by the World Geodetic System, which GPS satellites nonetheless use right now. Therefore the tendency of celebratory obituaries to underneathrating the purpose that without West’s work, GPS wouldn’t be possible.
Nor do any of them neglect to level out the truth that West was black, one in all simply 4 such mathematicians working for the Navy at Dahlgren. Stories like hers have drawn a lot higher public interest because the success of Hidden Figures, the Hollywooden adaptation of Marreceived Lee Shetterly’s ebook concerning the black feminine mathematicians at NASA during the House Race. When that film got here out, in 2016, even West’s personal children didn’t know the importance of the once-classified work she’d finished. Solely in 2018, when she professionalvided that information on a biographical type she crammed out for an occasion hosted by her college sorority, did it turn out to be public. She thus spent the final years of her lengthy life as a celebrity, sought out by academics and journalists desirous to underneathstand the contributions of another no-longer-hidden figure. However to their questions about her personal GPS use, she reportedly answered that she preferred a very good old-fashioned paper map.
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the writer of the newsletter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
