Gladys mae west biography9/18/2023 ![]() They married, had three children (and now seven grandchildren) and have been together for over 60 years. ![]() She fell in love with one of her two male, Black mathematician colleagues, Ira West. All the while, she earned a second Master's in public administration from the University of Oklahoma. She was hired as a computer programmer in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division and a project manager for satellite data-processing systems. There were only 3 other Black people there, one woman and two men, and she says felt the pressure to always do everything right and set an example. She taught again briefly before starting her career at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia (now the Naval Surface Warfare Center) in the US in 1956. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 1952 and taught math and science for two years before returning to complete her Masters in Mathematics at VSU in 1955. She choose the male-dominated field of mathematics, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. A great all-around student, she was unsure what subject to pursue but was encouraged to major in science and math since fewer people had the aptitude to tackle them. She secured a scholarship to Virginia State University, a HBPU (Historically Black Public University) as her high school class valedictorian. She decided early on that she needed an education if she didn't want to work in a factory or in the cotton, corn or tobacco fields. Her family were farmers in a community of share-croppers her mother also worked at a tobacco company and her father also worked for the railroad. ![]() ![]() Gladys Mae West (née Brown) was born in 1930 in in Sutherland, Dinwiddie County, in rural Virginia. Each 2-colour print is 11" by 14" (27.9 cm by 35.6 cm) on delicate Japanese kozo paper. This is one of my on-going series of women in science prints. West's work, using math to precisely model the shape of the Earth, laid the groundwork for GPS! She's only started to gain recognition for the career she built as a Black woman in mathematics and "Hidden Figure" of GPS, in the last few years. This is a hand-carved and hand-printed lino block print portrait of trail-blazing mathematician and geodesist Gladys West, with a worldmap with satellite tracks and three satellites important to her career: Seasat, GEOS-3 and, most famously one of the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. ![]()
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