Grace Murray Hopper, Computer Pioneer and Naval Officer, Commemorated in Biographical Profiles

Grace Murray Hopper was a pioneering American computer scientist and U.S. Navy rear admiral. She developed the first compiler in 1952, a program that translates English-like commands into machine code, and was instrumental in creating the COBOL language. Hopper's theories of machine-independent and user-friendly programming were foundational to modern computing. She retired from the Navy in 1986 at age 79 and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Naval service career

• ▪Hopper was initially rejected from the Navy for being too old (34) and underweight (105 lbs).
• ▪At the time of her final retirement, Grace Hopper was the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the United States Navy.
• ▪Grace Hopper joined the U.S. Naval Reserve (Women's Reserve) in 1943 after receiving a waiver for being underweight.
• ▪After being recalled to active duty multiple times, Grace Hopper retired from the Navy in 1986 as a rear admiral at age 79.

Academic mathematics background

• ▪Grace Hopper graduated from Vassar College in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics.
• ▪Before joining the Navy, Grace Hopper was an associate professor of mathematics at Vassar College.
• ▪Grace Hopper earned a master's degree in 1930 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1934, both from Yale University.

COBOL programming language

• ▪By the 1970s, COBOL was the most extensively used computer language in the world.
• ▪COBOL, which stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, was developed in 1959 by a consortium called CODASYL.
• ▪Grace Hopper served as a technical consultant to the committee that defined COBOL, which extended her earlier FLOW-MATIC language.

Compiler development work

• ▪A compiler is a program that translates written instructions, such as English-like words, into codes that computers can read directly.
• ▪Hopper's team later created FLOW-MATIC, the first programming language to use word commands, which was designed for data processing.
• ▪In 1952, Grace Hopper developed the first compiler, called A-0, which translated mathematical code into machine-readable code.

Machine-independent programming theory

• ▪Hopper also argued that small, distributed clusters of programming and storage were superior to large, centralized systems.
• ▪Grace Hopper believed programs should be written in a language close to English rather than in machine code or symbols.
• ▪Hopper advocated for the idea that a program should be hardware independent, meaning it should not need to be rewritten for a different computer.

Posthumous honors received

• ▪In 2016, Grace Hopper was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
• ▪Grace Hopper was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery after her death on January 1, 1992.
• ▪The U.S. Navy commissioned the USS Hopper, a guided-missile destroyer, in her honor in 1996.
• ▪Yale University renamed one of its residential colleges after Grace Hopper.

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