Garce hopper

Home / Scientists & Inventors / Garce hopper

They wanted Commander Hopper to work on improving their computer programs. The college could grant her a temporary leave to join the military or track her down at basic training. As a senior programmer, she wrote a program called a compiler. Motivated by a desire to serve her country and apply her skills in a practical way, she attempted to enlist in the Navy.

She was promoted through the ranks and became a powerful advocate for modernization and education within the military’s computing infrastructure. While Grace respected this idea, she hated staying behind. from Yale. In the late 1950s, Grace worked with a group of programmers to develop a language that could be used by different kinds of businesses and on a variety of computers.

Her work on the Mark I marked her formal entry into computer science, a field she would help shape for the rest of her life. She was the first of her parents’ three children. Grace was fortunate to grow up in a wealthy family that highly valued education. In many ways, Vassar helped to create Grace Hopper.

Grace Murray Hopper was a trailblazing mathematician, computer scientist, visionary educator, and decorated naval officer whose groundbreaking work shaped the foundations of modern computing.

One way or another, she was going off to serve her country. She was blunt, self-confident, and witty.

garce hopper

Courtesy of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, VA., 1988. These traits allowed her to succeed in the male-dominated field of computer science. Her retirement ceremony was held aboard the USS Constitution in Boston, a fitting tribute to someone who had helped build the foundation of the digital Navy.

When she could not put it back together, she decided to expand her study by taking apart the seven other alarm clocks found throughout her family’s large house. She immediately joined the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), a division of the U.S. Navy.

Military life changed her life completely. Skeptical colleagues refused to believe such a program could work, but Grace successfully demonstrated that her ambitious idea was possible.

Grace’s compiler paved the way for modern programming languages that allow human operators to tell computers what to do with few commands.

She quickly stood out for her inquisitive mind and intense curiosity.

VCEncyclopediaGrace Murray Hopper ’1928

“Computer pioneer, mathematician and teacher Grace Murray Hopper recalled seeing her first computer, the UNIVAC ‘thinking machine’: ‘When I walked in and saw that monster, I was scared to death!’” Read more about Hopper on the VCEncyclopedia.

In her mathematics and physics courses, Hopper excelled.