Meet Dr. Gladys West, the hidden figure behind your phone’s GPS | Massive Science

Gladys West is one of the reasons why you can receive driving directions from your phone or tag a photo location on Instagram, says Lauren Mackenzie Reynolds, PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal.

Photo: US Air Force

Whether you are getting driving directions from your phone or tagging the location of an Instagram photo, the use of GPS (Global Positioning System) has become seamlessly integrated into our daily lives. But less ubiquitous is the knowledge that GPS got its start in the mind of an Air Force mathematician named Gladys West...

Still a mathematician to her core, to this day West prefers using a paper map and making her own calculations rather than using the GPS technology that she helped develop

Source: Massive Science