"Gladys Mae West was born in rur­al Vir­gin­ia in 1930, grew up work­ing on a tobac­co farm, and died ear­li­er this month a cel­e­brat­ed math­e­mati­cian whose work made pos­si­ble the GPS tech­nol­o­gy most of us use each and every day. Hers was a dis­tinc­tive­ly Amer­i­can life, in more ways than one. Seek­ing an escape from the agri­cul­tur­al labor she'd already got­ten to know all too well, she won a schol­ar­ship to Vir­ginia State Col­lege by becom­ing her high school class vale­dic­to­ri­an;"
"It cost an equiv­a­lent of $81,860,000 in today's dol­lars, but no oth­er com­put­er had the pow­er to han­dle the project of cal­cu­lat­ing the pre­cise shape of Earth as affect­ed by grav­i­ty and the nature of the oceans. About a decade lat­er, anoth­er team of gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists made use of those very same cal­cu­la­tions when putting togeth­er the mod­el em­ployed by the World Geo­det­"
Gladys Mae West was born in rural Virginia in 1930 and grew up working on a tobacco farm. She won a scholarship to Virginia State College after becoming her high school class valedictorian and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics. She taught briefly, then took a job at the naval base in Dahlgren, where she verified the accuracy of bombing tables with a hand calculator and joined the computer programming team. In the early 1960s she and colleagues programmed mainframes by feeding punch cards into IBM's 7030 'Stretch', which performed calculations to model Earth's precise shape as influenced by gravity and the oceans. About a decade later, government scientists used those calculations when assembling a global geodetic model that underpins modern GPS technology.
Read at Open Culture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]