Grace Hopper

Grace Brewster Murray was born on the 9th of December 1906 in New York City. Her father was an insurance broker, and her mother had a love of mathematics, which she passed on to her daughter. Grace's parents sent her to private girls' schools in the city and made sure she received a proper education. Even as a child she demonstrated a fascination with machines. As a seven year old, Grace reduced her alarm clock to pieces trying to discover how it worked, and when she found she couldn't put it back together, did the same with the other seven clocks in her house before her mother caught her.

Hopper entered Vassar College in 1924. She studied math and physics, received her Baccalaureate in 1928, and then undertook research in mathematics at Yale University. She received her master's degree in 1930. In the same year she married and became Grace Hopper. Her husband died later in 1945 during WWII, and they had no children. She came to be a math professor at Vassar the following year, and continued with this job until 1943, after she was promoted to associate professor. She received her doctorate from Yale in 1934. She continued her education further by attending New York University in 1941 as a Vassar Faculty Fellow. When World War Two started, she persuaded the Naval Reserve to accept her and persuaded Vassar to grant her leave. At this point, she was only 34.

Hopper rose to the rank of lieutenant and was assigned to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project at the Cruft Laboratories at Harvard University. From 1944 she worked with Howard Aiken on the Harvard Mark I computer. By the end of the war, she was already working on the Mark II. In 1946 she ended her active duty with the Navy but remained a duty reservist. She resigned her Vassar job so that she could stay at Harvard and was made Research Fellow in Engineering Sciences and Applied Physics in the Computation Laboratory. There she worked on the Mark II and Mark III computers. In 1949 she joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which later would be bought by the Remington Rand Corporation and renamed the UNIVAC Division of Remington Rand. As a Senior Mathematician, she worked on the UNIVAC computer. Grace designed a compiler -- a program that translated mathematical code, a high-level programming language, into machine code, a low-level programming language. Later she was on a team that developed the Flow-Matic, the first English language data-processing compiler, which understood twenty English phrases. Many had told her earlier that computers could only do arithmetic, but Grace Hopper was certain that it was possible and pushed her idea. It was three years before it was finally accepted.

In 1950, she became the Systems Engineer and Director of Automatic Programming Development. She continued to work on compilers, with a special focus on a common business language (since the Flow-Matic was the only one in use at the time, COBOL, a complete English programming language created in 1959, was based off of it). She aimed for the international standardization of computer languages. During her time at the UNIVAC Division, she was also involved with the Navy. In the academic world, she took on many visiting positions, as in 1959, when she was a Visiting Lecturer at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania. She was a consultant and lecturer for the US Naval Reserve until her retirement in December 1966, by which time she had risen to the rank of Commander. In 1967 she was recalled to active duty as a leader in the Naval Data Automation, and left Sperry Corporations. She officially retired from her position at the company in 1971.

By 1973 her military career was still going strong. Lieutenant Hopper was promoted to Captain at the age of 67, and in 1977 she was appointed special advisor to Commander, Naval Data Automation Command, a position that she held until her retirement. Active service in the Navy did not prevent Hopper from interacting with the academic world, however, and she held the position of Lecturer in Management Sciences at George Washington University between 1971 and 1978. When she finally retired in August 1986, at 80 years of age, she was the oldest active duty officer in the United States. She had risen to the rank of Rear Admiral, becoming the nation's highest ranked female officer. Hopper was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award offered by the US Department of Defense. After her retirement, Rear Admiral Dr. Hopper took on a job as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation and held the position until 1990. Her role included making presentations on advanced computing concepts and serving as a corporation liaison with educational institutions.

Hopper was awarded many honors in both military and academic settings over the course of her remarkable life, far too many to be recorded here. The American naval ship the USS Hopper was named after her. The Data Processing Management Association named her the first Computer Science Man of the Year in 1969. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the Legion of Merit, and she received at least 37 honorary degrees between 1972 and 1987. In 1973, she became the first American and the first woman to be elected a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. Finally, in 1991 President George H. W. Bush presented her with the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor this country has to offer to its leading innovators.

A woman of that brilliance, that importance, does not deserve to be forgotten. In the words of the President, Grace Hopper was, and should be recognized as a "computer pioneer who spent a half century helping keep America on the leading edge of high technology." Two years after her death in 1992, another computer scientist, Anita Borg, co-founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference inspired by her legacy. It is designed to promote the research and career interests of women in the computing sector, and is the world's largest conference of its kind. In addition, Hopper's COBOL computer programming language is still in use. Even after her death, her legacy lives on and she is often referred to as the "mother of computing."

Written by Alejandra Dujon-Padin