Grace Murray Hopper By: Margaret Girard, Brandon Fitzgerald and Tabitha Thibault

Grace Murray Hopper

• By: Margaret Girard, Brandon Fitzgerald and Tabitha Thibault

Early Childhood and Family

• December 9, 1906 NYC

• Walter Fletcher Murray

• Mary Campbell Horne Murray

• Named after her mother’s best friend Grace Brewster

• ‘Amazing Grace’

• Oldest of three children

• Mary
• Roger

Hobbies and Interests

• Summer Vacations

• Kick the Can

• Hide and Seek

• Cops and Robbers

• Reading

• Needlepoint

• Playing the Piano

Grace at a Young Age

• Very Curious

• Alarm Clocks

• Practice Math Skills

• Father’s Influence

Grammar School

• Graham School

• Schoonmakers School

• Played basketball, water polo, and field hockey.

College Degrees

• Applied to Vassar in 1923

• Failed first attempt

• Attended Hartridge in NJ

• Phi Beta Kappa 1928

• Bachelors Degrees

After College

• Marriage

• Teaching

• Published Paper- “The ungenerated seven as an index to Pythagorean number theory”

• Divorced in 1946

Pre Military Career

• 1930

• Math Teacher at Yale University until 1934

• Left Yale

• Began teaching at Vassar, an all girls school

Beginning Military Career

• 34-years-old

• wanted to join the Navy Waves (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service)
• Too old to enlist, and too skinny

• December 1943

• Officially in the United States Navy

• 1944

• First active duty assignment-Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University (worked on Mark I, and wrote Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator)
• Worked under Howard H. Aiken

Influenced to Join the Navy

• December 7, 1941

• Pearl Harbor, American Navy Base was bombed
• Family had a strong military background

Trying to Retire

• 1966

• Grace retires at age 57
• Received rank of commander

• Retirement last one year

• 1967, called back into duty

Returning for More

• 1967

• Assigned to Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy
• Worked as an Automatic Data Processor for six months

• 1973

• Becomes Captain Grace Murray Hopper

• 1977

• Appointed Advisor to Commandor

Serving the Navy Proudly

• Involuntarily retires at age 74

• Served for 43 years

• 1985

• Promoted to Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
• One of only a few women to receive such an honor

• Oldest personnel retiree in Navy history

• One of the last WWII participant to leave active duty

Grace Hopper’s Contributions to Computers

Programming The First Computers

• Invented the first compiler in 1952 (A-0)

• It translated symbolic mathematical code into machine code allowing computers to understand “human” instructions

• FLOW-MATIC (B-0)

• She taught UNIVAC I and II, which were two of the first commercial computers to understand twenty English-like statements by the end of 1956.

• Used for business tasks, led to COBOL

Co-inventor of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language)

• COBOL made it possible for computers to respond to words rather than numbers.

• Developed a common language with which computers could communicate

• most widely used computer
• business language in the world
• enabled firms large and small
• to compile computerized payroll,
• billing, and other records.

The Mark 1 The First Modern Computer

Awards

• Named the first computer science Man of the Year in 1969

• The first woman to be elected Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1973

• In 1991 President George Bush awarded Hopper the National Medal of Technology

• Received at least 37 honorary degrees

Achievements

• Retiring from the Navy as a Rear Admiral and the oldest serving officer at that time

• Being the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale University.

• She was the first Naval Reserve woman to be called back to active duty.

Grace Hopper Died on January 1, 1992

• Grace Hopper Died on January 1, 1992

• She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, in the middle of Section 59 (59/973)

Remembering Grace

• Grace's Place is a museum about computers and information technology. It was named in memory of Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, in recognition of her contribution to computing in general, and specifically business computing.