Last week, we kicked off Black History Month with a post about the father of the modern blood bank, Charles Drew. This week, we are turning our attention to the woman who programmed the mathematical model that made GPS possible, Gladys West. In 1956, West was hired as a mathematician for the Navy—one of only four Black employees at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia—where she worked as a “human computer,” making calculations based on astronomical data. By the mid-1970s, as part of the Seasat project, West was programming the new IBM computer with specialized algorithms to model Earth.…
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