grace hopper

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Contribution to Science

Grace Hopper

Her early life

Grace Hopper was an american computer scientist who made significant contributions in the field of computing. She also served as a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy.

Key Achievements

1969: Receives the "computer sciences man of the year"

1971:"Grace Murray Hopper Award"

Full Name: Grace Brewster Murray Hopper Date of Birth: December 9, 1906, in New York City, United States of America Date of Death: January 1, 1992, in Arlington, Virginia, United States of America (aged 85)

1973: becomes"Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society"

1986: Upon retirement, she receives the "Defense Distinguished Service Medal"

1988: Receives the "Golden Gavel Award"

1991: Receives the National Medal of Technology

2016: Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Contribution to Science

• She was added to the team that worked on developing the programmes for the Mark I computer, one of the first electromechanical calculators in history. Her contribution was fundamental in writing the programme that enabled the US Navy to decipher part of the encryption codes used by the Axis forces in their communications.
• In 1949, she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, the company that had developed the ENIAC, among the first digital computers in circulation, and that at that time was designing the UNIVAC I, which would be the first commercial computer model.
• In 1959, Grace Hopper and her team of computer developers introduced Cobol (Common Business-Oriented Language), one of the most widely used computer languages, for the first time. Since then, Grace Hopper has been working on developing and refining this programming language, improving it in many parts and making it as similar as possible to a natural language.

The story is well known and documented at the American History Museum. In 1947, Grace Hopper and her team were searching for the cause of a malfunctioning Mark II computer when, to their amazement, they noticed that a moth had become embedded in the circuitry. After removing the insect, an operation that would have restored the computer to normal operation, Hopper referred to the moth as a 'bug' in the report. The story is known and documented at the American History Museum.

Did you know...?

Her early life

The first of three children, Grace showed great vivacity from an early age: at the age of seven she decided to take seven alarm clocks apart in an attempt to find out for herself how they worked and what all those gears were for. At the age of 16, her application for early admission to Vassar College was rejected (her grades in Latin were too low), but she was admitted the following year. Grace Hopper was also awarded a PhD in Mathematics from Yale University in 1934. This gave her the opportunity to begin a career as a university lecturer at Vassar College, where she taught for the next two years and then joined the US Navy Reserve in 1943.