Grace Hopper

Mini Bio

• Graduated from Vassar with a B.A. in mathematics in 1928

• She married a professor in 1930, Vincent Foster Hopper and soon began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931. By 1941 she had achieved the rank of associate professor and had won a faculty fellowship for study at New York University's Courant Institute for Mathematics.

• Hopper had come from a family with military traditions, she resigned her Vassar post to join the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) in December 1943. 

• She was commissioned a lieutenant in July 1944 and reported to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she was the third person to join the research team of professor (and Naval Reserve lieutenant) Howard H. Aiken. She recalled that he greeted her with the words, "Where the hell have you been?" and pointed to his electromechanical Mark I computing machine, saying "Here, compute the coefficients of the arc tangent series by next Thursday."

• Hopper soon learned how to program the machine and assembled a 500 page manual of operations for the Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator.* 

• At the end of WW2 in 1945, she was working on the MK II version of the machine. Even though her marriage was dissolved by this point and had no children, she kept her maiden name. Hopper was appointed to the Harvard faculty as a research fellow, and in 1949 she joined the newly formed Eckert-Mauchly Corporation.

• Hopper remained associated with Eckert-Mauchly and its successors (Remington-Rand, Sperry-Rand, and Univac) until her official "retirement" in 1971. Her work took her back and forth among institutions in the military, private industry, business, and academe. 

• In December 1983 she was promoted to commodore in a ceremony at the White House. When the post of commodore was merged with that of rear admiral, two years later, she became Admiral Hopper. 

• Throughout her life, it was her service to her country of which she was most proud. Appropriately, Admiral Hopper was buried with full Naval honors at Arlington National Cemetery on January 7, 1992.

Main Achievements

• Hopper soon learned how to program the machine and assembled a 500 page manual of operations for the Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator.* 

• UNIVAC 1 - First commercially available computer, in 1956, Westinghouse Electric Company installed a UNIVAC computer in its East Pittsburgh plant. The UNIVAC was used to calculate company payrolls, sales records, analysis of sales performance and other company business. The UNIVAC could perform 90,000 transactions per month.

• Her best-known contribution to computing was the invention of the compiler, the intermediate program that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer. She did this, she said, because she was lazy and hoped that "the programmer may return to being a mathematician." 

• COBOL - A programming script still used by many places in the UK and worldwide today

Main Contributions to Field

• New discipline of computing and the sciences that depend upon it have led the way in making space for women's participation on an equal basis. 

• Programmed some of the first EVER computers that were available for commercial use.

• She was one of the first software engineers and, indeed, one of the most incisive strategic "futurists" in the world of computing.

• Her work embodied or foreshadowed enormous numbers of developments that are now the bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula translation, relative addressing, the linking loader, code optimization, and even symbolic manipulation of the kind embodied in Mathematica and Maple.

Relation to Modern Living


May even change this section to just quotes that I can dissect and place accordingly in places in the exhibition, as most of the information regarding their relevance to the individual fields of science are relative to how said information is presented.




Quotes


"It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission"


"A ship in a harbour is safe, but that is not what a ship is built for"

UNIVAC I

http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html


http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/09/cobol-internet-programming


http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/UNIVAC-1-FullView-A.htm


http://gracehopper.org/2011/


http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/hopper.html


http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Grace_Hopper.aspx