Grace Hopper

Vassar turned her down at 16 because her Latin scores were too low, and took her the following year. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics and physics in 1928, took a master's at Yale in 1930, married the New York University professor Vincent Foster Hopper the same year, and finished a Yale doctorate on irreducibility criteria in 1934 under Oystein Ore. She taught at Vassar for a decade. Then the war, and the Navy said no: at 34 she was over age, her mathematics teaching was deemed too valuable to release, and she was 15 pounds under the minimum weight of 120. She got a waiver, went in through the Reserve in 1943, and finished first in her class at the midshipmen's school.

The Bureau of Ships put her on the Mark I at Harvard in 1944 under Howard Aiken, and she wrote its operating manual, the first document of its kind. In 1949 she left for Eckert-Mauchly and the UNIVAC I, published her first paper on compilers in 1952, and by 1954 was the company's first director of automatic programming, shipping MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC. Back in uniform she built the conformance tests that dragged the vendors' rival dialects of COBOL and FORTRAN back toward one standard. BriefHistory has the compiler argument and the admiral's stars. This page is the rest of her.

The credit is messier than the slogan. Her A-0 of 1952 is where the claim to the first compiler starts, but even the IEEE plaque dedicated at Penn in 2024 describes it as a compiler that functioned as a linker and loader. COBOL was written in 1959 by a short-term committee she advised as a technical consultant rather than sat on, building out from her FLOW-MATIC, and Jean Sammet was in the room. The Navy cost her more than the credit did. Turned down for a transfer to the regular service in 1946 because she was two years past the cutoff age of 38, she spent 43 years a reservist. Attrition rules retired her at 60 in 1966 and she was recalled within a year, retired again in 1971 and recalled in 1972.

She died in her sleep on New Year's Day 1992 at 85, at her apartment in Arlington County, and was buried with full military honors across the river. The National Medal of Technology came in 1991 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, 24 years after her death. A destroyer, the USS Hopper, carries her name. In February 2017 Yale renamed the residential college that had honored John C. Calhoun for her instead. The last turn is the odd one: Nvidia named a chip architecture Hopper, so the woman who spent a career insisting that nobody should have to think in machine code now has her name on the hardware.

Grace Hopper's life against the full span of the corpus.

• New Types of Irreducibility Criteria article
  Her Yale doctoral dissertation, in pure mathematics 1934
• A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator book
  Credited as the first computer manual 1946
• The A-0 System invention
  Where the claim to the first compiler begins — it worked as a linker and loader 1952
• FLOW-MATIC invention
  English-language data processing, and the direct ancestor of COBOL 1955
• COBOL invention
  Extended from FLOW-MATIC by a CODASYL committee she advised 1959
• Navy compiler validation suite invention
  Conformance testing that forced vendor dialects to converge. NIST inherited it 1970

• 1928 aged ~22 Graduates Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in mathematics and physics The college had rejected her two years earlier over her Latin scores.
• 1934 aged ~28 Takes a Yale PhD in mathematics under Oystein Ore
• December 1943 aged 36 Sworn into the Naval Reserve on a weight waiver She was 15 pounds under the 120-pound minimum and over the age limit.
• 1944 aged ~38 Assigned to the Mark I at Harvard under Howard Aiken She turned down a full professorship at Vassar to stay on the Navy contract.
• 1952 aged ~46 Publishes her first paper on compilers Her idea had been refused for three years on the ground that computers do not understand English.
• 1959 aged ~53 Advises the CODASYL committee that defines COBOL
• December 15, 1983 aged 77 Promoted to commodore by presidential appointment She had been stuck at captain for a decade.
• August 14, 1986 aged 79 Retires aboard the USS Constitution as the Navy's oldest serving officer She was 79. The ship was 188.
• January 1, 1992 aged 85 Dies in her sleep at Arlington County, Virginia

• Howard Aiken 1900–1973
  Physicist and engineer who designed the Harvard Mark I, an early electromechanical computer. worked under
• J. Presper Eckert 1919–1995
  Co-inventor of ENIAC and pioneer of electronic computing alongside John Mauchly. hired by
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. promoted her to commodore
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. awarded her the Medal of Freedom
• Katherine Johnson 1918–2020
  NASA mathematician whose orbital trajectory calculations supported the Mercury and Apollo crewed flights. parallel career in government computing