Women Scientists

Grace Hopper 1906-1992

At a glance:

pioneer American computer scientist and Rear Admiral

The fabulous Grace Hopper was born in New York and at first taught maths at Vassar College. But she came from a family with military traditions and in 1943, resigned from Vassar to join the Navy under the WAVES (women accepted for voluntary emergency service) programme. She joined a research team at the Ordnance Computation Project. Her main contribution to computing was to create the first standardised computer language COBOL which is still in use, together with the invention of the compiler, the intermediate progam that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer. She also invented the term 'debug'. A moth had stopped a machine working. As Hopper struggled to extract it, a supervisor asked what she was doing. 'Debugging Sir'. After the war she worked for a company that eventually became the Univac division of Sperry-Rand but continued to serve with the Naval Reserve. In 1967, she returned to active duty and at her retirement with the rank of Admiral in 1986 aged 80, she was the oldest serving officer in the US Navy.
Grace Hopper

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