Mary Tornich Janislawski was born in San Fransisco in 1908, the daughter of Italian and Yugoslavian immigrants. In her 20's, Mary worked in a candy factory to put herself through the University of California, Berkley, and was one of three students to graduate with honors in astronomy. Eventually, Janislawski pioneered the field of navigation in a similar way that Amelia Earhart shattered the boundaries of flight. She could out calculate any male classmate. In the mid-1930's, she was discovered by Captain Van Horn Weems, "the grand Old Man of Navigation" who taught Charles Lindbergh to navigate and Admiral Richard Byrd to fly. Weems patented dozens of navigational instruments like the Second-Setting watch and took Janislawski under his wing as a protege when navigation was dominated by men. She taught Weems' nautical and aerial navigation methods as an adjunct professor at U.C. Berkley, Stanford and Polytechnic College of Engineering in Oakland in the late 1930's. She became the first female associate of the worldwide Weems System of Navigation, Inc. and was declared America's "most outstanding woman teacher of aerial navigation" in 1940 by the New York Times. Those who knew Mary remembered her as a conduit of ancient techniques to the modern world.  According to Gaylord Green, one of the pioneers of the development and operation of Global Positioning Systems, Mary Janislawski was a founding member of the Institute of Navigation as navigation transitioned from a professional art to a science of the modern world.  During WW II, she taught some 4,000 cadets how to plot their positions at King City airport in Mesa Del Ray, California. She worked at Alameda Naval Air Station to train women in the U.S. Navy's WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) program in flight simulators for celestial navigation, and prepared Navy Fliers for missions from carriers and bases in the Pacific under radio silence. In the 1950's Transocean Airlines and Pan American World Airways engaged Janislawski to map Pacific routes.  In the last phase of her career, she contributed to the burgeoning space age by creating lunar grid maps to help the Apollo astronauts navigate the surface of the moon. In 1970, at the Institute of Navigation national space meeting at Ames research center she applied her celestial navigation methods to provide NASA a roadmap to navigate any planetary body - from Mars to yet-to-be discovered planets. In 1972, Janislaski was the first woman awarded the Superior Achievement award from the Institute of Navigation for helping generations of sailors, pilots, and astronauts make their way home.  When she died in 1998 at age 90, she was posthumously honored as the first female Fellow of the Institute of Navigation.