Dr. Gladys West: The Hidden Mind Behind GPS**

If you used your phone to find a new brunch spot this morning, checked a map for traffic, or tracked a package making its way to your doorstep — you have a brilliant Black woman from rural Virginia to thank.

Dr. Gladys Mae West, born in 1930 to a family of sharecroppers, grew up in a community where opportunities were scarce and expectations were modest. But she had a mind that refused to shrink. Numbers felt like home to her, and math became her way out of the fields and into a world where few Black women had ever been allowed to stand.

Her journey led her to a 42-year career with the U.S. Navy as a mathematician, working behind the scenes at a time when women — especially Black women — were rarely acknowledged, let alone celebrated. Yet her work quietly shaped modern life more than most presidents, CEOs, and tech giants combined.

While the world imagined satellites as science fiction, Dr. West was doing the hard, unseen work: creating the mathematical models that measure the true shape of the Earth. Not the perfect globe we see in textbooks, but the real, irregular, slightly lumpy planet we live on.

These calculations became the foundation for Global Positioning Systems — GPS as we know it today.

What she solved was not simple. She studied how gravity changes across different parts of the Earth, how satellites wobble as they orbit, and how signals bend as they travel through the atmosphere. Her formulas corrected all of that. Her models brought the planet into focus.

Without her equations, your phone wouldn’t know where you are. Your Uber wouldn’t arrive. Your airplane wouldn’t land precisely. Emergency responders wouldn’t reach people in time. Even farmers who now use GPS-guided tractors would be lost — literally.

Dr. West once said she knew her work was important but did not fully realize its impact until she saw how GPS became woven into everyday life. For decades, she stayed mostly invisible in the story of American innovation. But in 2018, she was finally honored by the U.S. Air Force for her groundbreaking contributions, and her name has been rising ever since — right where it belongs.

Today, at 95, Dr. West is a reminder of something Bronzecomm readers know well: excellence doesn’t always come with applause. Sometimes the greatest achievements grow quietly, in the hands of people who refuse to be limited by circumstance.

So the next time your phone says “You have arrived,” remember the Black woman who mapped the path long before anyone had a GPS in their pocket. 

Check out the Instagram video presentation from HistoraLegacy.