Grace Murray Hopper
Grace Hopper was born December 9, 1906 in New York, New York. Her mother was Mary Campbell Van Horne Murray who had an interest in mathematics. Her father was Roger Fletcher Murray, and insurance broker who came from a family of engineers. Hopper had two younger siblings: Marry, who was three years younger, and Roger, who was five years younger. Hopper was always at the top of her class at the Schoonmakerse School and went to Vassar College when she was 17 years old. She attended Vassar from 1924 to 1928 and graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in mathematics and physics and got her M.A. in 1930 and her Ph.D in 1934 from yale. She married Vincent Foster Hopper but they divorced in 1945 and had no children. She worked as a part of the Vassar faculty teaching mathematics from 1931 to 1943 to join the United States Naval Reserve. She was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard in 1944. Here, she was the first programmer on the Mark I computer which stood eight feet high and eight feet wide. . She was released from active duty in 1946 and joined Harvard faculty were she worked on the Mark II and Mark III were she made the term of computer "bug" when she found a moth stuck in the Mark II making it not work properly. She later joined the Sperry Rand Corporation where she worked on making the first commercial computer. UNIVAC (universal automatic computer) was much faster than any of the Mark series computers and was combined with COBOL (common business orriented language). COBOL was a compiler. A compiler enables computer to be able to translate between english and numbers. Hopper permidently retired from the Navy in 1986. Even after her retirement, she gave lectures to college and university students emphasizing change. Grace Hopper died in her sleep on January 1, 1992.
