Gladys West obituary

"She came to be thought of as another hidden figure a reference to the 2016 book and subsequent film about three black women who worked at Nasa during the space race. While West's story may have been less dramatic it took decades of painstaking work at the US Naval Weapons Laboratory for her to come up with the geodesic systems that would allow the precise measurements and mapping needed for the technology her work nevertheless transformed modern life."

"Yet the woman who helped to develop global mapping, which provides pinpoint locations everywhere on the planet, preferred to use traditional paper maps herself. I'm a doer, a hands-on person, she told the Guardian in 2020. If I can see the road and see where it turns and see where it went, I am more sure. It was this straightforward approach that helped West rise from a poor upbringing in the segregated American south"

Gladys West, who died aged 95, developed geodesic systems that enabled precise global mapping and the modern GPS. She spent decades at the US Naval Weapons Laboratory creating measurements and mapping required for the technology. She preferred traditional paper maps for navigation despite her work on global positioning. West became the second black woman and one of four African Americans at the Dahlgren navy facility in 1956 after federal hiring bans on racial discrimination. She began as a computer programmer and led a 1960s project analyzing Pluto's motion, producing over 5 billion calculations with punch cards. She received a commendation in 1979 and managed the Seasat radar altimetric program using the first ocean-monitoring satellite.

Read at www.theguardian.com