::THE SLICE REPORT WITH MONA AUSTIN

  Dr. Gladys Mae West — the trailblazing mathematician whose calculations helped shape the Global Positioning System and, in turn, modern life — has died at 95. She passed away on January 17, surrounded by family, closing the chapter on a life that transformed how the world moves, navigates, and connects. Born in 1930 in rural Sutherland, Virginia, West rose from a sharecropping community during the Jim Crow era to become one of the first Black women hired as a mathematician at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia. There, she developed the precise mathematical models of Earth’s shape — the geoid — that made GPS accuracy possible, laying the foundation for the navigation systems now embedded in smartphones, aviation, shipping, emergency response, and global defense. For decades, her contributions remained largely unrecognized outside scientific circles. Only later in life did she receive broader acknowledgment as one of the hidden figures of American innovation — a...