Gladys West is ‘Hidden Figure’

Boulder is the home of many well-educated people. But we are largely unaware of the role African Americans have played in bringing about important features of our world today.

As an engineer for a satellite imaging company, I am impressed by the contributions of Gladys West.

West is a black woman and mathematical genius who was born in 1930, the daughter of field workers in Virginia.

She was hired in 1956 as a mathematician for the U.S. Naval Weapons Laborator y. Her work would help change our world. Her work involved collecting data from orbiting satellites that would help to determine their exact location as they transmitted from around the world.

Her calculations and computer programming helped construct a geoid (a mathematical model of the Earth’s shape) that directly contributed to the ubiquitous use of GPS today.

She became project manager for the Seasat radar altimetr y project. Seasat was launched in 1978 and was the first satellite designed for remote sensing of oceans with synthetic aperture radar.

Her work was such that her super visor, Ralph Neiman, recommended her for a commendation in 1979. “This involved planning and executing several highly complex computer algorithms which have to analyze an enormous amount of data,” Neiman wrote. “You have used your knowledge of computer applications to accomplish this in an efficient and timely manner.”

Twenty years after retiring, she received the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers award for her decades of contributions to the Air Force’s space program, one of Air Force’s Space Command’s highest honors.

She did all this despite the many impediments she faced as a black woman.

See the film “Hidden Figures” to get a sense of both the difficulties faced and the determination she and her fellow black mathematicians showed in helping create our space program.

rick CLELLAND Boulder