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Women’s History Profile:
Dr. Gladys West
It may have hit your timeline, news feed, or whatever the main grid is called on your preferred social media platform, that Dr. Gladys West, mathematical visionary and “Architect of the Global Positioning System (GPS),” passed away last week at 95 years of age. You may raise the question as to why Dr. West is relevant to our ongoing discussion on architecture and design, and why I have chosen to honor her legacy in an article in BAD.d. This would be an appropriate question to raise, considering Dr. West, after all, was a mathematician, not a capital “A” architect. She worked for the US Naval Proving Ground, not for SOM or Moody Nolan. What I believe qualifies her to be worth our time is the impact that her work had on the architecture and design professions. It would be remiss to overlook the relationship between space-race era computational development and the way we realize ideas in architecture and urban planning today. There has never been a project I have worked on where I did not open Google Earth to analyze a site. Geolocation in model-making software has changed the game for site-specific analyses across the board. It has changed the way we view the world, completely altering the designers propinquity to scale and perspective. All this is to say that I believe Dr. Gladys West is owed her flowers by the architecture and design community just as much as she was owed by mathematicians and engineers as a “hidden figure”.
A bit about Dr. Gladys Mae West:
Born in rural Sutherland, Virginia, on October 27th, 1930, Gladys Mae West (then, surname Brown) was born to a sharecropper family in Jim Crow Dinwiddie County. Her mother worked in a tobacco factory, her father on the railroad. Both instilled the power of education in their daughter, and from a young age, she was aware that a good education would ensure a path well beyond the fields of Virginia and the segregated American South. In an interview with VPM, West shared, “ I really did like geometry. I fell in love with that”.
By the time she reached high school, West was the valedictorian of her class, earning her a full scholarship to HBCU, Virginia State University. Her high honors in academics led to advanced success in her career, as she was offered a position directly after graduation at the Naval Proving Ground, later known as the Naval Surface Warfare Center, in Dahlgren, Virginia. She was the second Black woman to be employed at this facility, and was one of four Black employees.
The beginning of her career was primarily space-focused. In the early 1960s, West was a participant in an award-winning astronomical study on the relative motion between Pluto and Neptune. Later, she began building mathematical models in search of uncovering whether the true shape of Earth was a perfect sphere or a subtly irregular form determined by gravity, tides, and rotation. In 1986, West completed a technical publication titled “Data Processing System Specifications for the GEOSAT Satellite Radar Altimeter”. This study, in practice, significantly enhanced geoid height measurement and vertical deflection calculation accuracies, which had a direct role in the development of GPS calculations.
Despite the widespread application of Dr. West’s work, her contributions to the development of this globally prevalent software remained widely unrecognized until 2018. It was in this year that Dr. Gladys West was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame, and she was added to the BBC’s list of 100 influential women. In 2021, she was awarded the first woman to receive the Prince Philip Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering – the academy’s highest individual honor.
In the same VPM interview, when speaking retrospectively on her career, West shared, “I’m pretty satisfied that I used myself up”. Stated with a smile, despite decades without recognition, Dr. West was fully satisfied with her accomplishments as just that – accomplishments; goals set for her, by her, for the benefit of her own personal growth – and thankfully, for ours as a global design community too.
Until next month,
stay BAD.d
Written by Keren Dillard
Additional source:
Pride Publishing Group, “Gladys Mae West, The hidden mathematician behind GPS accuracy, dies at 95”