After 42 years of federal service, Gladys West retired from the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, having laid the mathematical foundation for GPS.
On August 26, 1998, Gladys West concluded a remarkable 42-year career in federal service, retiring from the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia—the successor institution to the Naval Proving Ground where she began her career in 1956.
Over four decades, West rose from an entry-level mathematician to a leading figure in satellite geodesy, playing a pivotal role in developing the increasingly refined mathematical models of the Earth's shape (the geoid) that underpin the accuracy of the Global Positioning System. Her work, largely unrecognized publicly at the time of her retirement, would later be credited as essential to a technology now used by billions of people daily for navigation, timing, and countless applications.
Her retirement marked the end of an extraordinary, if underappreciated, career that spanned from the early era of room-sized mainframe computers to sophisticated satellite data processing systems. It would take nearly two more decades before the broader public would learn of her critical contributions, following media attention beginning in 2017. West's story exemplifies the phenomenon of women, and particularly Black women, whose scientific contributions went uncredited for years despite being foundational to major technological achievements.