Grace Brewster Hopper (born Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. She was one of the first people to work on computer programming. Hopper created the idea for programming languages that could work on different types of computers. She used this idea to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language still used today. She also helped program the Harvard Mark I computer, one of the first large computers. Hopper wrote the first manual for operating the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, a type of early computer.

Before joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics and mathematical physics from Yale University. She was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. During World War II, she left her teaching job to join the United States Navy Reserve. In 1944, she began working on the Harvard Mark I computer, which was led by Howard H. Aiken. In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and helped develop the UNIVAC I computer. At Eckert–Mauchly, she helped create one of the first COBOL compilers, tools that translate programming code into instructions computers can use.

Hopper believed programming should use simple English-based language. Her compiler changed English words into machine code, which computers understand. In 1952, she completed a program linker (called a compiler) for the A-0 System. In 1954, she led a team at Eckert–Mauchly that developed early compiled languages like FLOW-MATIC. In 1959, she helped create COBOL through the CODASYL consortium, a group that designed programming languages based on English words. Hopper promoted COBOL’s use during the 1960s.

The U.S. Navy named a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Hopper, after her. A supercomputer at NERSC, the Cray XE6 "Hopper," and an Nvidia GPU architecture, "Hopper," were also named in her honor. During her life, Hopper received 40 honorary degrees from universities worldwide. A college at Yale University was renamed for her. In 1991, she was awarded the National Medal of Technology. In 2016, President Barack Obama posthumously gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2024, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) honored Hopper with a marker at the University of Pennsylvania for her role in inventing the A-0 compiler during her time as a lecturer in engineering.

Early life and education

Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York City. She was the oldest of three children. Her parents, Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne, had Scottish and Dutch ancestry and attended West End Collegiate Church. Her great-grandfather, Alexander Wilson Russell, was an admiral in the U.S. Navy who fought in the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War.

Grace was very curious as a child, a trait she kept throughout her life. At age seven, she wanted to learn how an alarm clock worked and took apart seven clocks before her mother discovered what she was doing. Her mother then allowed her to work with only one clock. Later in life, she owned a clock that ran backward. She explained, "Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counterclockwise."

For her preparatory school education, she attended the Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey. Grace was first denied early admission to Vassar College at age 16 because her Latin test scores were too low. She was accepted the following year. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics. She earned her master’s degree from Yale University in 1930.

In 1930, Grace Murray married Vincent Foster Hopper, a professor at New York University (1906–1976). They divorced in 1945. She did not marry again and kept his last name.

In 1934, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale under the guidance of Øystein Ore. Her dissertation, "New Types of Irreducibility Criteria," was published that year. She began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931 and was promoted to associate professor in 1941.

Career

Grace Hopper tried to join the Navy at the start of World War II but was not allowed. At 34 years old, she was too old to enlist, and her weight was below the Navy's requirements. The Navy also believed her job as a mathematician and professor at Vassar College was important for the war. In 1943, during the war, Hopper took a leave of absence from Vassar and joined the United States Navy Reserve. She was one of many women who volunteered to serve in the WAVES, a group of women in the Navy.

To join the Navy, Hopper needed special permission because she was 15 pounds (6.8 kg) lighter than the Navy's minimum weight of 120 pounds (54 kg). She began training in December at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College in Massachusetts. In 1944, Hopper graduated first in her class and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University as a lieutenant, junior grade. She worked on the Mark I computer programming team led by Howard H. Aiken.

Hopper and Aiken wrote three papers about the Mark I, also called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. After the war, Hopper asked to transfer to the regular Navy but was denied because she was two years older than the age limit of 38. She continued to serve in the Navy Reserve. Hopper worked at the Harvard Computation Lab until 1949, choosing to stay there instead of accepting a professorship at Vassar.

In 1949, Hopper became a senior mathematician at the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and joined the team developing the UNIVAC I, the first large-scale electronic computer sold in 1951. Hopper suggested creating a programming language that used English words instead of symbols. She was told this was not possible because computers could not understand English. However, she believed people would find it easier to write programs in English, and computers could translate them into machine code.

Her idea was not accepted for three years. During this time, she published her first paper on compilers in 1952. In the early 1950s, the company was bought by Remington Rand, and Hopper's compiler work was completed while she worked there. Her program was called the A compiler, and its first version was A-0.

In 1952, Hopper created a program called a compiler, which was used to translate instructions into machine code. Many people did not believe her work was possible at the time. In 1954, Hopper became the company's first director of automatic programming. Her work was influenced by the Laning and Zierler system, which used algebraic notation. Her team developed early compiler-based programming languages, including MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC.

Hopper explained that her A-0 compiler translated mathematical symbols into machine code. She believed that using English words instead of symbols would make programming easier for most people. This idea led to the creation of COBOL, a programming language for data processing. COBOL allowed people to write instructions like "Subtract income tax from pay" instead of using complicated symbols. COBOL became the most widely used business language.

In 1959, Hopper advised a group of experts at the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL), where COBOL was developed. COBOL combined ideas from Hopper's FLOW-MATIC language and IBM's COMTRAN. Hopper's belief that programming languages should be close to English was reflected in COBOL. Jean E. Sammet, a Mount Holyoke College alumna, was also part of the committee that created COBOL.

From 1967 to 1977, Hopper worked as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group and was promoted to captain in 1973. She helped create software to test and standardize COBOL for the Navy.

In the 1970s, Hopper supported the use of small, connected computers instead of large, central systems. She helped develop standards for testing computer systems and programming languages like FORTRAN and COBOL. These standards helped different computer companies use similar programming languages. In the 1980s, the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) took over responsibility for these tests.

Retirement

In line with Navy rules about leaving the service, Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve at the rank of commander when she turned 60 at the end of 1966. She was asked to return to active duty in August 1967 for a six-month assignment that became an ongoing job. She retired again in 1971 but was asked to return to active duty in 1972. In 1973, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. promoted her to captain.

In March 1983, Republican Representative Philip Crane saw Hopper on a television show called 60 Minutes. He then supported a proposal to promote her to commodore on the retired list. The proposal was sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee but was not approved. Instead, President Ronald Reagan promoted Hopper to commodore on December 15, 1983, using the Appointments Clause. She stayed in active duty for several years past the normal retirement age with special permission from Congress. On November 8, 1985, the rank of commodore was changed to rear admiral (lower half), making Hopper one of the Navy’s few female admirals.

After more than 42 years of service, Hopper retired from the Navy on August 14, 1986. At that time, she was the oldest active-duty officer in the Navy. A celebration was held on the USS Constitution in Boston to honor her retirement, where she received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat award given by the Department of Defense.

When she retired, Hopper was 79 years, 8 months, and 5 days old, making her the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the Navy. Her retirement ceremony took place on the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned ship in the Navy, which was 188 years, 9 months, and 23 days old at the time.

Post-retirement

After retiring from the Navy, Grace Hopper was hired as an important advisor by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). She was first offered a job by Rita Yavinsky, but she wanted to go through the usual formal interview process. She jokingly suggested she would accept a job that allowed her to work on alternating Thursdays, be displayed in their computing museum as a pioneer, and receive a high salary and unlimited expenses. Instead, she was hired as a full-time Principal Corporate Consulting Engineer, a position equivalent to a senior executive. In this role, she spoke at industry events, joined committees, and had other responsibilities. She held this position until her death at age 85 in 1992.

At DEC, Hopper mainly worked as a representative for the company. She gave talks about the early days of computing, her career, and ways computer companies could help their users. She visited most of DEC's engineering centers, where she often received standing ovations after her speeches. Even though she was no longer in the military, she always wore her Navy uniform during these lectures, even though it was against U.S. Department of Defense rules. In 2016, Hopper received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, for her work in computer science.

"The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler," she said, "is training young people. They come to me and ask, 'Do you think we can do this?' I say, 'Try it.' And I support them. They need that. I keep track of them as they grow and remind them to take chances."

Anecdotes

Grace Hopper was often asked to speak at events related to computers during the later part of her career. She was well known for her energetic and humorous speaking style, as well as for sharing many stories from the war time. She also became famous for a nickname, "Grandma COBOL."

In 1947, while working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, Hopper’s team found a moth stuck in a relay, which was stopping the computer from working. They removed the insect and wrote in their log book for that day, "First actual case of bug being found." Although Hopper and her team did not use the word "debugging" in their notes, this event is considered one of the first examples of fixing a computer problem, or "debugging." The term "bug" was already used in other fields before being applied to computers. Today, the moth is preserved in a log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Hopper became famous for a teaching tool called "nanoseconds." People, such as generals and admirals, often asked her why satellite communication was slow. She gave them short pieces of wire, each about 11.8 inches (30 cm) long, which showed how far light could travel in one nanosecond. She called these wires "nanoseconds" and explained that the length represented the farthest signals could go in a vacuum, but they would move more slowly through actual wires. Later, she used the same wires to explain why computers needed to be small to work quickly. At her talks, she often gave out "nanoseconds" to the audience and compared them to a 984-foot (300-meter) coil of wire, which represented a microsecond. While working for DEC, she also gave out packets of ground pepper, calling the individual grains "picoseconds."

Jay Elliot described Hopper as seeming very military, but when you looked closer, you found someone who had a playful, adventurous spirit inside.

Death

On New Year's Day in 1992, Hopper died peacefully in her sleep due to natural causes at her home in Arlington County, Virginia. She was 85 years old at the time of her death. Hopper was interred with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

Awards and honors

• 1964: Hopper received the Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award, the highest honor given by the society. The award recognized her important work in the growing computer industry as an engineering manager and creator of automatic programming systems. In May 1950, Hopper was one of the founding members of the Society of Women Engineers.
• 1969: Hopper received the first Data Processing Management Association Man of the Year award, now called the Distinguished Information Sciences Award.
• 1971: The annual Grace Murray Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Computer Professionals was created by the Association for Computing Machinery.
• 1973: Hopper was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
• 1973: She became the first American and first woman of any nationality to be named a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.
• 1981: Hopper received an Honorary PhD from Clarkson University.
• 1982: She received the American Association of University Women Achievement Award and an honorary Doctor of Science from Marquette University.
• 1983: Hopper was given the Golden Plate Award by the American Academy of Achievement.
• 1985: She received an Honorary Doctor of Science from Wright State University and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Western New England College (now Western New England University).
• 1986: At her retirement, Hopper received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal. She also received an honorary Doctor of Science from Syracuse University.
• 1987: Hopper became the first recipient of the Computer History Museum Fellow Award. The award honored her contributions to programming languages, her work on standardization, and her long service in the navy.
• 1988: She received the Golden Gavel Award from Toastmasters International.
• 1991: Hopper was awarded the National Medal of Technology for her pioneering work in creating computer programming languages that made technology easier to use. She was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• 1992: The Society of Women Engineers created three annual, renewable scholarships named the "Admiral Grace Murray Hopper Scholarships."
• 1994: Hopper was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
• 1996: The USS Hopper (DDG-70), nicknamed "Amazing Grace," was launched. It is one of the few U.S. military ships named after women.
• 2001: Poet Eavan Boland wrote a poem titled "Code" in her book Against Love Poetry, dedicated to Grace Hopper. The Government Technology Leadership Award, called the "Gracies," was also named in her honor.
• 2009: The Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center named its main system "Hopper." The Office of Naval Intelligence created the Grace Hopper Information Services Center.
• 2013: Google created a Doodle for Hopper's 107th birthday. The animation showed her sitting at a computer, using COBOL to print her age. At the end, a moth flew out of the computer.
• 2016: On November 22, 2016, Hopper was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her achievements in computer science.
• 2017: Hopper College at Yale University was named in her honor.
• 2021: The Admiral Grace Hopper Award was established by the chancellor of the College of Information and Cyberspace (CIC) at the National Defense University. The award recognizes leaders in information and cybersecurity within the National Security community.

Legacy

Grace Hopper received 40 honorary degrees from universities around the world during her lifetime. Nvidia named its 2024 CPU generation "Grace" and its GPU generation "Hopper" in her honor. The Navy’s Hopper Information Services Center and a guided-missile destroyer are also named after her. In 2019, Time magazine created 89 new covers to celebrate women of the year, starting from 1920, and selected Hopper for 1959. On June 30, 2021, a satellite named "Grace" (also called ÑuSat 20 or COSPAR 2021-059AU) was launched into space. On August 26, 2024, the NSA released a 90-minute talk given by Hopper in 1982, split into two parts.

Grace Hopper Avenue in Monterey, California, is home to the Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center and the National Weather Service’s San Francisco Bay Area forecast office. The Grace M. Hopper Navy Regional Data Automation Center is located at Naval Air Station North Island, California. Grace Murray Hopper Park in Arlington County, Virginia, is a small memorial park near her former home, now owned by the county. Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, dedicated a computer lab to Hopper in 1985, calling it the Grace Murray Hopper Center for Computer Learning. The academy also awards a Grace Murray Hopper Prize to graduates who excel in computer systems. Hopper spent her childhood summers in Wolfeboro.

Grace Hopper College is one of Yale University’s residential colleges. An administration building at Naval Support Activity Annapolis (formerly Naval Station Annapolis) in Maryland is named the Grace Hopper Building. In 2020, Hopper Hall became the U.S. Naval Academy’s academic building for its cyber science department, the first at any service academy named after a woman. The U.S. Naval Academy also owns a Cray XC-30 supercomputer named "Grace," hosted at the University of Maryland-College Park. Building 1482 at Naval Air Station North Island houses the Naval Computer and Telecommunication Station San Diego and is named the Grace Hopper Building. Building 6007 at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is also named after her. Grace Hopper Lane is the name of a street outside the Nathan Deal Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center in Augusta, Georgia.

Grace Hopper Academy, a for-profit programming school in New York City, opened in 2016 to increase the number of women in software engineering careers. A bridge over Goose Creek at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina, is named the Grace Hopper Memorial Bridge. Minor planet 5773 Hopper, discovered by Eleanor Helin, is named in her honor. The official naming was published by the Minor Planet Center on November 8, 2019. Grace Hopper Hall, a community meeting hall in Orlando, Florida, is named after her. The U.S. Naval Academy dedicated Hopper Hall, its cyber and computer science building, to Rear Admiral Hopper in 2020, and it opened to students in 2021.

Women at Microsoft formed an employee group called "Hoppers" and established a scholarship in her honor. Since 2015, one of the nine competition fields at the FIRST Robotics Competition world championship has been named after Hopper. A professorship in the Department of Computer Sciences at Yale University was established in her honor, with Joan Feigenbaum named to the position in 2008. In 2020, Google named its new undersea network cable "Grace Hopper," connecting the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. The cable was completed in 2021 and spans 3,900 miles.

In Gene Luen Yang’s comic book series Secret Coders, the main character is named Hopper Gracie-Hu. Since 2013, Hopper’s official portrait has been included in the matplotlib Python library as sample data to replace the controversial Lenna image. Her legacy inspired the creation of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, a yearly conference that highlights the research and career interests of women in computing.

Obituary notices

• Betts, Mitch. Computerworld. Volume 26, page 14. 1992
• Bromberg, Howard. IEEE Software. Volume 9, pages 103–104. 1992
• Danca, Richard A. Federal Computer Week. Volume 6, pages 26–27. 1992
• Hancock, Bill. Digital Review. Volume 9, page 40. 1992
• Power, Kevin. Government Computer News. Volume 11, page 70. 1992
• Sammet, J. E. Communications of the ACM. Volume 35, issue 4, pages 128–131. 1992
• Weiss, Eric A. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Volume 14, pages 56–58. 1992