Grace Hopper
Early Life and Education
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was born on December 9, 1906, 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, respectively. Hopper showed an early interest in engineering, a trait she inherited from her mother, who had a love for mathematics.
Hopper attended the Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey. She was initially rejected for early admission to Vassar, but was admitted the following year. 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 in 1930.
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 teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and was promoted to associate professor in 1941.
Career and Research
Hopper's career took a significant turn during World War II. She attempted to enlist in the Navy early in the war, but was rejected because of her age (34). However, in 1943, she was able to join the Navy Reserves through the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) program.
Hopper was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard, where she worked on IBM's Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Mark I), the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the United States. Hopper and her team were responsible for programming the Mark I and conducting computations for the Manhattan Project.
In 1946, Hopper was discharged from the Navy and she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. It was during this time that she found a moth in the Mark II, which was causing problems with the machine. This led to the term "debugging" a computer.
In 1949, Hopper joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, where she helped to develop the UNIVAC computer. In 1952, she had an operational compiler. "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."
Hopper's belief that programs could be written in a language that was close to English (rather than in machine code or in languages close to machine code, such as assembly languages) was captured in the new business language, COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language). The COBOL language is still in use today.
Hopper served on the committee that defined the ALGOL language. In the 1970s, she advocated for the Defense Department to replace large, centralized systems with networks of small, distributed computers. Any user on any computer node could access common databases located on the network. She developed the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components, most significantly for early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL.
Later Life and Legacy
Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of commander in 1966, but she was recalled to active duty in August 1967 for a six-month period that turned into an indefinite assignment. She was promoted to captain in 1973 by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr.
In 1983, Hopper was promoted to commodore by special Presidential appointment. Her rank was elevated to rear admiral in 1985, making her one of few women admirals in the history of the United States Navy. Hopper retired (again) from the Navy on August 14, 1986. At a celebration held in Boston on the USS Constitution to commemorate her retirement, Hopper was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat decoration awarded by the Department of Defense.
Among her many other accolades, 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. In 1997, the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her.
Hopper passed away on January 1, 1992. In 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.