You use the work of Dr. Gladys West most days without knowing her name — walking a crowded city block or crossing an empty desert, any device in your pocket giving you a location accurate to within about seven meters relies on mathematics she wrote. The earth is not a fixed shape; its surface shifts constantly under gravitational and rotational forces, and pinpointing any exact location on it required, for the first time, a precise geodetic model of the planet itself. West built that model, processing satellite data by hand and by early computer to calculate the earth's true form — the small globe she holds here, with its single mapped pin, is a compressed history of what that calculation eventually made possible for everyone. Born in 1930 to sharecroppers in rural Virginia, she worked the fields as a child, graduated valedictorian of her segregated high school, and won a scholarship in mathematics before landing, in 1956, a rare position at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory that few Black women of her generation were offered. There she became what colleagues called a human computer, converting raw orbital data into the mathematics that would later underpin the Global Positioning System. She retired, earned a second master's degree, then a doctorate in public administration at seventy, and published a memoir, It Began With a Dream. The Air Force inducted her into its Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2018 — official recognition, decades late, of foundational work most of the world still doesn't know to credit her for.