Grace Murray Hopper Facts
Grace Murray Hopper Facts
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| Interesting Grace Murray Hopper Facts: |
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| Grace was born Grace Brewster Murray in New York City, the oldest of three children. |
| She showed an early interest in engineering and at the age of seven tore apart seven of the family's alarm clocks to see how they worked. |
| In 1928 she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar with a B.S. in mathematics and physics and earned her M.S. from Yale in 1930. |
| Hopper received her PhD from Yale in 1934 and her dissertation "New Types of Irreducibility Criteria" was published the same year. |
| In 1943, Hopper took a leave of absence from her teaching job at Vassar to serve in the U.S. Navy Reserves. |
| She graduated from the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School in 1944 and was assigned to the Mark I computer programming staff. |
| In 1949 Hopper became a senior mathematician at Ecker-Mauchly computer company and helped develop UNIVAC I. |
| In 1952 she invented a working compiler. |
| In 1954 she became the company's first director of automatic programming and she and her team developed the first compiler languages, MATH-MATHIC and FLOW-MATIC. |
| In the spring of 1959 she served as technical consultant to the team that invented COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) which became an industry standard computer language. |
| From 1967 to 1977 she was the director of programming languages in the Navy's Office of Information Systems and was promoted to captain in 1973. |
| In the 1970's she advocated distributed computing for the Navy and pioneered the creation of standards for computer systems and languages. |
| In 1966 she retired from the Naval Reserve at the age of 60 but was recalled to active duty from 1967 to 1970. |
| She retired again in 1971 but was recalled to active duty from 1972 to 1986. |
| Among her many awards was the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat decoration given by the Department of Defense. |
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