Maker Info
Grace Murray Hopper
Grace Brewster Murray was born in 1906 in New York City. She graduated from Vassar with a degree in mathematics in 1928. She earned her Ph.D. at Yale in 1934 in mathematics. In 1930 she married Vincent F. Hopper, an educator, and took his last name. Although the marriage ended in divorce, she kept her married name (Grace Murray Hopper). She started teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931.
In 1943, Grace Hopper resigned from Vassar to join the Navy WAVES. Commissioned as a lieutenant, she reported in 1944 to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. Here she joined the team assembled by Naval Reserve Lieutenant Commander Howard H. Aiken. Aiken had requested her months earlier and greeted her with the words, “Where the hell have you been?” Then he pointed to the newly installed IBM ASCC-Harvard Mark I computer and said, “There’s the machine. Compute the coefficients of the arc tangent series by next Thursday.” Hopper rose to the challenge.
By 1945, she was working on the Mark II, and would later work on the Mark III for the Navy. While working on the Mark II on September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper traced a problem in the hardware to a fat moth stuck in Relay #70 on Panel F causing a short circuit. Hopper taped the moth in her logbook with a note joking about computer bugs, "The first actual case of bug being found."
After serving as a research fellow in engineering sciences and applied physics at Harvard, she left in 1949 to join the newly formed Eckert-Mauchly Corporation (established by the builders of ENIAC and involved in building the UNIVAC). She was their senior mathematician. She remained there until her retirement in 1971, even as the company changed owners and names (Remington Rand and then Sperry).
Hopper's best-known contribution to computing was during this latter part of her career. In 1953 she invented the compiler--the program that translates that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer. This idea was a predecessor of COBOL, the business programming language of which she is credited as a co-inventor.
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper died in 1992.
