Gladys’s mind swirls with numbers and shapes as the world enters the high-tech space age. This is the lyrical true story of a groundbreaking Black mathematician whose inventions led to the creation of GPS. Little Gladys is a farm girl who loves math. But as a Black kid growing up in Virginia in the mid-twentieth century, she sees life around her as less than or greater than but never equal. When a teacher calls her “college material,” Gladys knows she can achieve her dreams-and goes on to get a higher education and land a job calculating trajectories and orbits at a naval base with only four Black employees. To help space rockets land safely, Gladys uses satellites to create a better model of Earth, which looks more like a lumpy potato from Gladys’s childhood than a perfect sphere! Gladys’s amazing work eventually leads to the creation of GPS, which now lets people everywhere navigate our uneven planet.
