Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was born on December 9, 1906. She lived in New York, New York. She studied math and physics at Vassar College. after she graduated she proceeded to Yale University, where, in 1930, she received a master's degree in mathematics. In 1931, Hopper began teaching at Vassar while also continuing to study at Yale, where she earned a PhD in mathematics in 1934. She had became one of the first few woman who to earn this certain degree. Grace became an associate professor at Vassar, continued to teach until World War II compelled her to join the U.S. Naval Reserve in December 1943. She was a commissioned as a lieutenant in June 1944. Hopper was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she learned to program a Mark I computer. The Mark 1 computer is actually called the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator(ASCC), but called the Mark 1 by Harvard University's staff, was a general purpose electromechanical computer that was used in the war effort during the last part of World War II. Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve in 1966, but her pioneering computer work meant that she was recalled to active duty—at the age of 60—to tackle standardizing communication between different computer languages. She would remain with the Navy for 19 years. When she retired in 1986, at age 79, she was a rear admiral as well as the oldest serving officer in the service.