Communications of the ACM
Mathematician Inducted into Space and Missiles Pioneers Hall of Fame
Gladys West was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame during a ceremony in her honor at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
Credit: Adrian Cadiz
Lt. Gen. David Thompson, U.S. Air Force Space Command vice commander, presented Gladys West with the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers award for her decades of contributions to the Air Force's space program. West was unable to attend the formal induction ceremony that took place August 28, where three others joined the elite list of professionals who have greatly impacted the Air Force space program.
West is among a small group of women who did computing for the U.S. military in the era before electronic systems. Hired in 1956 as a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, she participated in a path-breaking, award-winning astronomical study that proved, during the early 1960s, the regularity of Pluto's motion relative to Neptune. Thereafter, from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, using complex algorithms to account for variations in gravitational, tidal, and other forces that distort Earth's shape, she programmed an IBM 7030 "Stretch" computer to deliver increasingly refined calculations for an extremely accurate geodetic Earth model, a geoid, optimized for what ultimately became the Global Positioning System (GPS) orbit.
From Air Force Space Command Public Affairs
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