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Grace Hopper ○❜｜Definition｜1st｜20261023172208-00-⌔
Grace Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.1 She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which was a major influence on COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, “A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator”, and is often credited with creating the first compiler.
Before joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. She left her position at Vassar to join the United States Navy Reserve during World War II. Hopper began her computing career in 1944 as a member of the Harvard Mark I team, led by Howard H. Aiken. In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I computer.
At Eckert–Mauchly she managed the development of one of the first COBOL compilers. She believed that programming should be simplified with an English-based computer programming language, which would be translated into machine code through a secondary program called a compiler. By 1952, Hopper had finished her program2, which was written for the A-0 System.3456 In 1954, Eckert–Mauchly chose Hopper to lead their department for automatic programming, and she led the release of some of the first compiled languages like FLOW-MATIC. In 1959, she participated in the CODASYL consortium, helping to create a machine-independent programming language called COBOL, which was based on English words. Hopper promoted the use of the language throughout the 1960s.
The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke -class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her, as was the Cray XE6 “Hopper” supercomputer at NERSC,7 the “Grace” supercomputing cluster at Texas A&M University,8 and the Nvidia GPU architecture “Hopper”.910 During her lifetime, Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world. A college at Yale University was renamed in her honor. In 1991, she received the National Medal of Technology. On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.11 In 2024, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) dedicated a plaque at the University of Pennsylvania in honor of invention the A-0 compiler, that functioned as a linker/loader, by Grace Hopper during her time as a lecturer in the School of Engineering.1213
Printed 2026-10-23.
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Link to original Footnotes
Cantrell, Mark (March 1, 2014). “Amazing Grace: Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, USN, was a pioneer in computer science”. Military Officer. Vol. 12, no. 3. Military Officers Association of America. pp. 52–55, 106. Retrieved March 1, 2014. ↩
While she called this program a compiler, in a modern system it would be a subcomponent of a compiler called a linker ↩
Donald D. Spencer (1985). Computers and Information Processing. C.E. Merrill Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0-675-20290-9. ↩
Laplante, Phillip A. (2001). Dictionary of computer science, engineering, and technology. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. ISBN 978-0-8493-2691-2. ↩
Bunch, Bryan H.; Hellemans, Alexander (1993). The Timetables of Technology: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Technology. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-76918-5. ↩
Booss-Bavnbek, Bernhelm; Høyrup, Jens (2003). Mathematics and War. Birkhäuser Verlag. ISBN 978-3-7643-1634-1. ↩
“Hopper”. National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Archived from the original on March 14, 2016. Retrieved March 19, 2016. ↩
“Hardware - Texas A&M HPRC”. hprc.tamu.edu. Retrieved August 11, 2026. ↩
“NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip”. Retrieved May 25, 2024. ↩
Helmore, Edward (February 23, 2024). “‘Amazing Grace’: the name behind Nvidia’s $2tn chip empire”. The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved May 28, 2024. ↩
Carson, Erin (November 23, 2016). “White House honors two of tech’s female pioneers”. CBS News. Retrieved November 23, 2016. ↩
Scheffler, Ian (May 16, 2024). “Recognizing a Pioneer: The IEEE Dedicates Milestone to Grace Hopper at Penn Engineering”. Penn Engineering Blog. Retrieved June 7, 2024. ↩
Scheffler, Ian (June 6, 2024). “Recognizing a pioneer: Penn Engineering’s Grace Hopper”. Penn Today. Retrieved June 7, 2024. ↩
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