... did their best to provide for us the only way they knew how, with strong values, prayer, and an enduring work ethic.

Not unlike ex-enslaved people throughout the south, Blacks did what they could to get an education. In rural Sutherland, they pooled their meagre resources and built a one-room schoolhouse, which they named Butterwood Road School. Their books were those discarded by white students - usually marked up and with missing pages. The students were taught reading, writing, and arithmetic from first through seventh grades - all in one room and all by one teacher. There was no transportation and many of the students had to walk as many as five miles to attend.

Every day I wished and dreamed of having more - more books, more classrooms, more teachers, and more time to dream and imagine what life would be like if only I could fly away from the strenuous and seemingly never-ending work on our family farm. I just had to get away from that farm someday. It surely was not the place for an open-minded girl like me, with big city dreams.

I now realize how much of a positive influence they had on me while I was an undergraduate student. Their example alone was enough to inspire me to go as far as I could as a scholar, and their advice and guidance were priceless.

It seemed like she still had something to prove, and maybe she felt like she was carrying the weight of other women on her shoulders. She probably wanted to be respected equally by the others in her profession, who were almost always men.

I wasn't sure if they were serious, and I couldn't find it on a map, so I had no idea where Dahlgren was located.

... had great vision and foresight, bringing in those big computers, which required lots of mathematicians and scientists. Niemann believed that recruiting women and minorities into the workforce was one way to bring in people with very strong skills who may have been overlooked elsewhere. At a time when so many were overlooking those who had looked like me, Niemann gave me a chance, the chance of a lifetime.

She still remembers her first day. The military base was grey, and people were mingling before starting work, laughing and drinking coffee. She met the man who would become her husband, Ira West - but refused to be distracted and at first largely ignored him. "I just got there and I was a serious woman. I didn't have time to be playing around," she says. Her white colleagues were friendly and respectful, but initially didn't socialise with her outside the office - something she tried not to let get to her.

I wanted to adapt to this fascinating, new environment and succeed as soon as I could. I knew my work was cut out for me. As a double minority like I was, at a time where opportunities for women and people who looked like me were scarce, I felt there would be a lot of folks counting on me. There were other women of colour who were coming behind me, the Hunters, and my family back home, and I absolutely wanted to make them proud.

After the shocking Sputnik launch at the end of that year, the military's computing resources were increasingly devoted to its embryonic satellite program, including TRANSIT, the predecessor of GPS. By the 1960s, West was working on experimental satellite altimeter systems that were designed to measure the exact shape of the Earth. In the following decade, she was promoted to project lead for the SEASAT program, which deployed a new kind of three-dimensional radar technology to detect oceanographic conditions, including winds, water temperature, ice formations, and other crucial data. All of that work culminated in a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when West led a five-person team programming an IBM Stretch 7073 computer to calculate what is technically known as the "geoid" - a description of the Earth's true gravitational shape. Imagine a hypothetical planet entirely covered by ocean water, with no land masses - but still influenced by the same gravitational forces of the real Earth, the ones created by mountain ranges or deep sea trenches. Instead of an even sea level distribution across its surface, there would be subtle undulations in the height of the oceans: sea levels would be slightly higher in places experiencing lower gravitational forces and vice versa. The geoid is a mathematical description of that shape. Not only did Gladys West create the first accurate account of the geoid, but she even wrote a handbook for future technicians describing the best techniques for creating even more accurate models of the geoid. That map of Earth's gravitational fields was the final missing piece that allowed the creation of the modern GPS system, with its near-instant results and remarkable accuracy.

Filtering of a large portion of Geos 3 satellite radar altimetry data at the Naval Surface Weapons Center has been accomplished by a Wiener smoother. The statistics of the geoid for the Wiener smoother is based on a third-order Markov process. Because of some limitations the Wiener smoother has been replaced by a Kalman smoother which satisfies more closely the conditions of the altimetry data. The Kalman smoother also uses the same third-order Markov statistics. A discussion of the smoothers (filter models), results obtained from the models, and a comparison of results with ship survey data are given in this paper.

The radius and the origin of a mean earth ellipsoid have been determined using geoid heights derived from SEASAT-1 radar altimetric observations of the ocean surface and potential coefficients. While assuming that the altimetric geoid is the best available, adjustments are made to the geoid derived from potential coefficients so that the geoid differences are minimised. This adjustment is then applied to the ellipsoid which best fits the geoid derived from potential coefficients. Solutions using two different sets of altimetric geoid heights and geoid heights based on the DOD WGS 72 and GEMl0B potential coefficients gave a mean ellipsoid with radius a = 6378134.9 m and origin shifts less than 1 m in the x and y components and approximately −2.5 m in the z component. A description of the geoid height data used in the solutions for the ellipsoid parameters, results of the solutions, and a summary are presented.

... reflecting on all the computations I had performed to calculate the shape of the Earth.

West's contributions went unrecognised not just by herself, but others too. Her 42-year career at the navy base was largely unremarked. But years later, she sent a short autobiography to a sorority function. To her surprise, her sorority sisters were blown away. "I just thought it was my work, and we'd never talk to our friends about work. I just never thought about it. I didn't brag about what I was working on," West says. "But to see other people so excited about it, that was amazing."

We always get pushed to the back because we are not usually the ones that are writing the book of the past. It was always them writing and they wrote about people they thought were acceptable. And now we're getting a little bit more desire to pull up everyone else that's made a difference. ... I felt proud of myself as a woman, knowing that I can do what I can do. But as a black woman, that's another level where you have to prove to a society that hasn't accepted you for what you are. What I did was keep trying to prove that I was as good as you are. There is no difference in the work we can do. ... I'm hoping that, from the protesters marching for Black Lives Matter, we become better people, closer to the reality of who we really are, and the world becomes more united than it is now.