Grace Hopper

Computer programmer and US Navy rear admiral

• Born: December 9, 1906
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: January 1, 1992
• Place of death: Arlington, Virginia

Primary Company/Organization: US Navy

Introduction

At a time when women in the field of mathematics and science were anomalies, Grace Hooper was instrumental in the development of computer languages that allowed individuals without a thorough understanding of mathematics to use computers as they evolved over the course of the twentieth century. She is considered the major force in the development of the computer system used by the U.S. Navy and across-the-board military computing technologies. She foresaw that data would be stored in computers, eliminating the need for reams of paper. Her work on COBOL was a necessary precursor to the development of BASIC, which was used in the operating systems of early computers such as IBM and Apple and in the development of Microsoft Windows. For her contributions to computer programming, Hopper earned the nicknames the Grand Lady of Software, the Grandmother of COBOL, and Amazing Grace.

Early Life

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was born into a wealthy family. Her father, Walter Fletcher Murray, was in the family's insurance brokerage business. Because he had health problems that led to a double amputation, Hopper's mother, Mary Campbell Van Horne Murray, who had always loved mathematics, assumed responsibility for handling financial tasks within the household. As a child, Grace shared her mother's love of mathematics and developed an abiding interest in taking things apart to see what made them work. She and her siblings, Mary and Roger, were encouraged to excel in their classes at the private schools they attended. While growing up in New York City, Hopper spent her summers visiting her grandparents on Lake Wentworth in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, developing a lasting love for the ocean. Her maternal grandfather, John Van Horne, was a surveyor in New York City, and young Grace sometimes helped him with his work. Her great-grandfather Alexander Russell had been a rear admiral in the US Navy.

Grace attended Hartridge, a girl's boarding school in Plainfield, New Jersey, before enrolling at Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1924. Since women at that time were discouraged from becoming engineers, she majored in mathematics and physics. According to the customs of the day, she was allowed to audit classes in botany, physiology, geology, business, and economics in addition to courses for credit. After receiving a B.A. with honors from Vassar in 1928, she was awarded two fellowships to continue her studies elsewhere and began working on a master's degree in mathematics at Yale University. At Lake Wentworth, she met Vincent Hopper, who taught mathematics at New York University. The couple married in 1930, and she graduated from Yale with a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1934. Between 1934 and 1937, Yale had awarded only seven doctorates in mathematics. Hopper, whose dissertation was titled “The Irreducibility of Algebraic Equations,” was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale and the only woman in that group of seven to receive one. After living apart for several years, the Hoppers divorced in 1945.

Life's Work

Known as Amazing Grace by the media and her colleagues in the Navy, Hopper spent her sixty-five-year career challenging norms. That desire for innovation and change affected her academic studies, her chosen professions, and the way she lived her life. Throughout her career, she would be known for her combative personality and high energy level. By 1931, she was teaching algebra, trigonometry, calculus, probability theory, and statistics at Vassar. As a teacher, she proved unique, using cards and dice to teach probability and having her students simulate the building and operation of cities.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hopper was anxious to enlist in the newly created Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES), a division of the Navy. Her brother was in the Army Air Forces, her father was on the Selective Service Board, her mother served on the ration board, and Grace had a cousin who was a nurse. However, she was told that, at age thirty-six, she was too old to enlist. Weighing only 105 pounds, she also failed to meet the weight requirement. Instead, she spent the summer of 1943 teaching mathematics to women who worked in military laboratories.

Hopper was persistent, and after taking temporary leave from Vassar, she persuaded the Navy to allow her to enlist. She finished at the top of her midshipmen's class, which included many former students, in June 1944. In a move that forever changed the direction of her life, Lieutenant (JG) Grace Hopper was assigned to work on the Mark I computer at Harvard University in the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project, writing computer programs for military use. Hopper remained in the Navy after the war as a reservist and turned down a full professorship at Vassar to continue her work on computer programming at Harvard.

As Hopper's interest in computers expanded, she developed the unprecedented notion that programs could be written so that even those who were not mathematically minded could work on computers. She understood the drawbacks in the common practice of writing languages specific to particular computers. Such ideas led her to write standard codes in plain language that could be translated into binary code. She eventually called her computer language FLOW-MATIC.

In 1949, Hopper accepted a position as senior programmer at the newly created Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia while continuing as a Navy reservist. She worked on the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) 1, the first computer built in the United States for commercial use. At 14 feet long and 8 feet high, the UNIVAC I was at that time the smallest computer ever built. It was able to process three thousand operations per second. Since it had internal memory, it was not dependent on the punch cards or tape that characterized most computers of the time. Hopper recruited other women to work with her.

By the time UNIVAC I was operating, in 1951, Remington Rand had purchased Eckert-Mauchly and Hopper was working on developing computer programs for business use, tailoring many of them to specific businesses. In 1952, she was promoted to lieutenant colonel. By 1955, she was continuing to develop her own codes while providing technical advice to a team working on COBOL. She therefore became known as the grandmother of COBOL (an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language). Also in 1952, Remington Rand merged with the Sperry Corporation; the company would later become today's Unisys. By 1962, the computer giant IBM was using COBOL in its computer programs, and computers had developed the capability of processing three million instructions per second. Hopper left Sperry Rand in 1967. After a brief forced retirement, in 1967, at the age of sixty-one, Hopper was named the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy's Office of Information Systems Planning and Development. She remained there for the rest of her naval career.

In 1983, at the age of seventy-six, Hopper was promoted to the rank of commodore by special presidential appointment. Two years later, the title was changed to rear admiral. On August 14, 1986, she retired as the oldest commissioned naval officer still on active duty. At her request, the ceremony was held in Boston Harbor aboard the USS Constitution (Old Ironsides), the oldest ship in the American fleet. Not content to rest on her laurels, Hopper continued working as a consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation. Over the following years, her health declined, and she died on January 1, 1992, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Personal Life

Later in life, Hopper received attention as a public figure. She enjoyed giving interviews and appeared on both radio and television programs, such as 60 Minutes. She also promoted some of the myths that had grown up around her life. One myth was that she had coined the phrase “computer bug” when she discovered a moth in a naval computer that was interfering with its operation. It was also falsely reported that her husband had died in World War II and that she was the creator of COBOL. Before her death, she destroyed most of her personal correspondence.

Hopper remains one of the most celebrated women in the history of the American military. She was awarded forty honorary doctorates. In 1969, the Data Processing Management Association named her its “man” of the year. In 1973, she became the only American ever to be designated as a distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. In 1980, Hopper was awarded the Navy's Meritorious Service Medal for her work on the tactical data systems used by the Navy's fleet of nuclear submarines. In 1987, the Navy honored Hopper's overall contributions to the computer industry by naming its San Diego computer center after her. In 1991, she became the first woman to be awarded the National Medal of Technology. In 1994, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1996, a guided missile destroyer, the USS Hopper, was christened in her honor.

Bibliography

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Billings, Charlene W. Grace Hopper: Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer. Hillside: Enslow, 1989. Print.

Hey, Tony, and Gyuri Pápay. The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. Print.

Indovino, Shaina. Women in Engineering. Broomall: Mason Crest, 2014. Print.

Isaacson, Walter. "Grace Hopper." The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon, 2014. 88–95. Print.

Reynolds, Moira Davison. “Grace Hopper: Pioneer Computer Programmer and Naval Officer.” American Women Scientists: 23 Inspiring Biographies, 1900–2000. Jefferson: McFarland, 1999. 88–94. Print.

Thomas, Petty. Grace Hopper. Parsippany: Pearson Learning Group, 2008. Print.

Whitelaw, Nancy. Grace Hopper: Programming Pioneer. New York: Freeman, 1995. Print.

Williams, Kathleen Broome. Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea. Annapolis: Naval Inst., 2005. Print.

Williams, Kathleen Broome. “Grace Murray Hopper: Computer Scientist.” Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II. Annapolis: Naval Inst., 2001. 113–53. Print.