Grace Hopper

Grace Brewster Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.

One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming.

Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and the FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended by others to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.

Prior to joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in both mathematics and mathematical physics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College.

Hopper attempted to enlist in the Navy during World War II but was rejected because she was 34 years old.

She instead joined the Navy Reserves, leaving her position at Vassar.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics and earned her master's degree at Yale University in 1930.

In 1930, Grace Murray married New York University professor Vincent Foster Hopper (1906–1976); they divorced in 1945.

She did not marry again and retained his surname.

She began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and was promoted to associate professor in 1941.

In 1934, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale under the direction of Øystein Ore.

Her dissertation, "New Types of Irreducibility Criteria", was published that same year.

Hopper began her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark I team led by Howard H. Aiken.

In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I computer.

At Eckert–Mauchly she managed the development of one of the first COBOL compilers.

She believed that programming should be simplified with an English-based computer programming language.

Her compiler converted English terms into machine code understood by computers.

By 1952, Hopper had finished her program linker (originally called a compiler), which was written for the A-0 System.

During her wartime service, she co-authored three papers based on her work on the Harvard Mark 1.

She is accredited with writing the first computer manual, “A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.”

In 1954, Eckert–Mauchly chose Hopper to lead their department for automatic programming, and she led the release of some of the first compiled languages like FLOW-MATIC.

In 1959, she participated in the CODASYL consortium, which consulted Hopper to guide them in creating a machine-independent programming language.

This led to the COBOL language, which was inspired by her idea of a language being based on English words.

Hopper promoted the use of the language throughout the 60s.

In 1966, she retired from the Naval Reserve, but in 1967 the Navy recalled her to active duty.

She retired from the Navy in 1986 and found work as a consultant for the Digital Equipment Corporation, sharing her computing experiences.

The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyer guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC, and Nvidia Superchip "Grace Hopper".

During her lifetime, Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world.

A college at Yale University was renamed in her honor.

In 1991, she received the National Medal of Technology.

On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York City.

She was the eldest of three children.

Her parents, Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne, were of Scottish and Dutch descent, and attended West End Collegiate Church.

Her great-grandfather, Alexander Wilson Russell, an admiral in the US Navy, fought in the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War.

Grace was very curious as a child; this was a lifelong trait.

At the age of seven, she decided to determine how an alarm clock worked and dismantled seven alarm clocks before her mother realized what she was doing (she was then limited to one clock).

Later in life, she was known for keeping a clock that ran backward, she explained, "Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counterclockwise."

For her preparatory school education, she attended the Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey.

Grace was initially rejected for early admission to Vassar College at age 16 (because her test scores in Latin were too low), but she was admitted the following year.