#Dr gladys west software#
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West participated in a path-breaking, award-winning astronomical study that proved, during the early 1960s, the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune.

#Dr gladys west software#

She transitioned to verifying data transmitted from satellites to determine their exact location in the 1950s and 1960s, and “she worked on computer software that processed geoid heights, or precise surface elevations,” according to NSWC Dahlgren documents.

#Dr gladys west code#

“That was the biggest computer in the Navy at the time …, so that was exciting because it was so fast and you could code much larger programs,” West said. She initially did the calculations by hand, but when the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) computer was installed, she became its programmer. Her first job at Dahlgren as a mathematician was verifying range and bombing tables. They raised three children, and you could say they lived happily ever after, West said in later years. One was a mathematician named Ira West, and the two dated and eventually married in 1957. When West began her career, she was the second black woman hired at the lab and one of only four black employees. “That’s when life really started,” she has said in numerous interviews. Naval Weapons Laboratory, an early forerunner to Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division. She later obtained a doctorate in Public Administration.ĭeterminedly, West sought out jobs where she could use her diverse skills and eventually was hired in 1956 as a mathematician at the U.S. She taught school in Sussex County for two years before she went back to school for her master’s degree in Public Administration.

West majored in mathematics, which at the time, was a field studied nearly exclusively by men. When she learned that the valedictorian and salutatorian from her high school would earn a scholarship to Virginia State College (now University), she studied and graduated at the top of her class. She often said she pursued higher education to escape a hard life on a farm. Gladys Mae Brown was born in 1930 in Dinwiddie, Virginia, a rural farming community.

Trailblazers in their fields, these women broke down barriers, defied expectations, and continue to inspire intelligence analysts daily across the maritime and defense community. Looking back on the legacies of some of the amazing women who have contributed to the field of technology at sea.