Grace Murray

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Grace Murray Hopper was born on December 9, 1906, in New York City, and died on January 1, 1992, in Arlington, Virginia. She was a distinguished U.S. Navy officer and a leading computer scientist. Hopper worked on the first large computer, the Mark I, and her work led to the development of the first compiler for computers. She also worked on the development of COBOL, one of the first programming languages. Hopper coined the term "bug" when she discovered a small moth inside the circuits that was causing errors in execution. In 1973, while still in the reserves, Hopper became the first woman to reach captain rank in the U.S. Navy. Although retired, Hopper was recalled to active duty in 1967. In 1983, she was promoted to Rear Admiral, and when she retired again in August 1986, she was the oldest active-duty officer in the U.S. After her retirement, she worked as a consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation until her death. In 1969, Hopper received the Data Processing Management Association's Man of the Year award. After 40 years of pioneering work with computers, Hopper said that her greatest contribution had been training many young people. Grace Brewster Murray graduated from Vassar University in 1928 with a B.A. in mathematics and worked under the direction of algebraist Oystein Ore at Yale for her M.A. in 1930 and her Ph.D. in 1934. Hopper married Vincent Foster Hopper, an educator, in 1930 and began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931. She became an associate professor in 1941 when she won a fellowship to study at the New York University's Courant Institute for Mathematics. Hopper came from a military family tradition, so she resigned her position at Vassar to join the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) in December 1943. She was commissioned as a lieutenant in July 1944 and assigned to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project at Harvard University. She became the third person to join the research team of Professor and Reserve Naval Lieutenant Howard H. Aiken. Her first work with the Mark I (electromechanical computer) was calculating the coefficients of series development of the arccosine. Hopper soon learned how to program that machine, writing a 500-page manual in which she established the fundamental principles of programming computers. At the end of World War II, in 1945, Hopper was working on the Mark II. Without children, she divorced that year. Although she continued using her married name, she soon became an investigator at Harvard University and joined the Eckert-Mauchly Corporation in 1949. From then on, she always had two jobs simultaneously. She remained associated with Eckert-Mauchly and its successors (Remington-Rand, Sperry-Rand, and Univac) until her official retirement in 1971. At the same time, she worked in both the military institution, private industry, private businesses, and academic work. In December 1983, she was promoted to commodore in a ceremony at the White House. Two years later, she became Admiral of the Navy. Hopper was one of the first software engineers and really one of the most influential in the development of the computer world. Perhaps her most known contribution is the invention of the compiler, an intermediate program that translates natural language instructions (English) into internal language (machine code instructions). According to her, she designed it because she was lazy and wanted the programmer to return to being a mathematician. Her work involved and drove enormous development: subroutines, translation formulas, relative addresses, link loader, code optimization, and even symbolic manipulation of the type that Mathematica or Maple currently do. At the end of her life, she was proud of the service she had rendered to her country. For this reason, she was buried with honors in Arlington National Cemetery on January 7, 1992.