Grace Hopper

Background

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and a United States Navy rear admiral born in New York City to parents Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne, who were of Scottish and Dutch descent. After leaving high school, Hopper graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics and went on to earn her master’s degree at Yale University in 1930. In 1934, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, and later, began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931. She was promoted to associate professor in 1941.

During World War II Hopper tried to join the Navy, however, she was rejected due to her age and then joined the Navy Reserves. She started her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark I team led by Howard H. Aiken, and in 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the group that created the UNIVAC I computer. While she was part of Eckert–Mauchly, Hopper developed one of the first COBOL compilers, which would convert English terms into machine code understood by computers. By 1952, Hopper had finished her program linker (initially called a compiler), which was written for the A-0 System.

Her other ventures included co-writing three papers based on her work on the Harvard Mark 1, during her wartime service, and in 1954, Hopper was chosen by Eckert–Mauchly to lead their division for automatic programming. In 1959, she partook in the CODASYL consortium, which led to the COBOL language. In 1966, Hopper exited the Naval Reserve, but in 1967 the Navy recalled her to active duty. She retired from the Navy in 1986 and began working as a consultant for the Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1992, on New Year’s Day, Hopper died in her sleep of natural causes in Arlington, Virginia, when she was 85 years of age.