Dr. Gladys Mae Brown West

Noted Navy mathematician and computer programmer Gladys Mae Brown was born to Black sharecroppers in Sutherland, Virginia, on October 27, 1930, just years after legislation in the state codified its harshest post-Civil War discrimination based on race. Growing up on a small tobacco farm, she dreamed of a different life with wider opportunities. Her grit and love of learning enabled her to become a mathematician. She grew up in the segregated South, where racial discrimination was not only legal but ardently enforced. Black people had access to separate schools, hospitals, and restaurants that were, by design, inferior and poorly funded compared to the ones available for white people.

In the face of the wanton discrimination of the times, voices for social change were sounding during Brown’s childhood. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called for “bringing Negro schools up to an absolute equality with white schools.” In 1938, lawsuits sought equal pay for Black school teachers in Virginia. It would be 20 years before the state’s government began to respond positively to these calls. Highly educated Blacks at the time faced employment limitations that restricted their opportunities to Blacks-only institutions.  Even as a child, Brown was aware of the drive for equality:

“I had some ideas in my mind that teachers were at a higher level, did more to help the community, you respected them more, and there was a certain thing about education, school, and all that, that got you to be the best you could be.” 

Brown excelled in high school and earned a college scholarship by finishing first in her class. Mathematics was her favorite subject.

She went on as a diligent student at Virginia State College, a historically Black college now known as Virginia State University. While there, she also prepared herself for a life of discrimination in the workforce, as her teacher had experienced before her. West graduated in 1952 with a degree in mathematics. She took a job teaching at a segregated high school. Two years later, she returned to Virginia State to pursue a master’s degree in mathematics.

After earning her master’s degree, Brown began looking for work as a mathematician. The timing of her job search was very fortuitous. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had just signed an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in the federal workforce and among government contractors. That order overrode state and local laws and traditions. Eisenhower’s order contributed to the decision of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, to make her an job offer.

The Navy used the facility at Dahlgren to test artillery. They hired her to perform mathematical calculations to create tables of weapon trajectories. As an early adopter of computers, the center also became an early site of satellite research. Their major satellite programs including GEOS-3, GEOSAT, and Seasat relied on human mathematicians to supervise the machine calculations. During her first week on the job, she met another mathematician named Ira West, one of only two Black men in her department. He worked on calculating the trajectories of ballistic missiles launched by submarines. They got married in 1957.

Gladys West became a skilled computer programmer during her time at Dahlgren. She worked with satellite data to create accurate models of the Earth’s shape, also known as the geoid. The Earth is not a perfect sphere but has an irregular shape that distorts calculations that assume a spherical shape. As Earth rotates, it bulges out at the equator. West was trying to map the Earth using mathematical approximations. Her work improved the realism of the Earth-geoid model. In turn, her work helped the Navy be more accurate in mapping positions and targeting. It generated a better understanding of the relationship between actual locations and the model locations. West’s work was indispensable for accurate weapons targeting. Her team also studied how these forces from an irregularly shaped Earth can affect orbiting satellite trajectories. The calculations that West and her team conducted contributed to the improved accuracy of targeting on Earth and satellite orbits. The Navy’s work predated similar calculations to make the Global Positioning System (GPS) possible and accurate.

The research at the Dahlgren facility was considered important military research and thus was highly classified. For that reason, West did not acquire the fame that another group of Black women mathematicians who worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration not far from Dahlgren in Langley, Virginia, did. Unlike the “Hidden Figures” of NASA, much of Gladys West’s work and significance remain military secrets, even today.

After retirement from Dahlgren in the late 1990s, West returned to school to earn a doctorate degree in Public Administration at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) in 2000. And surprisingly, she remained a stalwart advocate of using paper maps over electronic navigation systems. 

Gladys West’s contributions to our understanding of the Earth that we live on drew on satellites of her time and continue to influence how we navigate today. Her legacy will live on, too. The Museum’s upcoming RTX Living in the Space Age Hall will feature a digital display that tells Gladys Mae Brown West’s story in her own words. Her story will inspire new generations to step up and study science and mathematics.