gladys mae west He was born in rural Virginia in 1930, grew up working on a tobacco farm, and died earlier this month as a prominent mathematician whose work made possible the GPS technology most of us use every day. Her life was, in many ways, uniquely American. Seeking an escape from the agricultural labor she was already accustomed to, she earned a scholarship to Virginia State University by being valedictorian of her high school class. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics, she taught for a while and then applied for a job at the naval base in Dahlgren. She first distinguished herself there by verifying the accuracy of bombing tables using hand calculators, then moved on to the computer programming team.
This was the early 1960s, when programming a computer meant painstakingly feeding punched cards into giant mainframes, not coding. West and her colleagues used IBM’s first transistorized machine, the 7030 (or “Stretch”). This was the world’s fastest computer for several years.
It cost the equivalent of $81.86 million in today’s dollars, but no other computer was capable of handling the project, which involved calculating the exact shape of the Earth as it is affected by gravity and the properties of the oceans. About a decade later, another team of government scientists used the exact same calculations when putting together the model employed in the World Geodetic System, which is still used by GPS satellites today. Therefore, we see the following trends: A celebratory obituary to emphasize the point Without West’s research, GPS would not have been possible.
Also, none of them neglect to point out the fact that West was black and one of only four mathematicians who served in the Dahlgren Navy. Stories like hers have received much greater public interest since the film’s success. hidden personHollywood version. margot lee shetterly books About black female mathematicians at NASA during the space race. When that film was released in 2016, not even West’s own children knew the significance of the once-classified work she had done. It wasn’t until 2018, when she provided that information on a biographical form she filled out for an event sponsored by her university’s sorority, that the information became public. Thus she spent the last years of her long life as a celebrity sought out by researchers and journalists eager to understand the contributions of another no longer hidden figure. But when asked about her own GPS usage, she reportedly said she prefers good old paper maps.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages ​​and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
