Grace Hopper was born Grace Murray on December 9, 1906, in New York City.¹ After graduating from Hartridge High School in Plainsview, New Jersey, she applied to attend Vassar College at 16. Her first attempt was denied, due to low scores in Latin, but she was admitted the following year. Hopper, then Murray, graduated from Vassar with a bachelor's degree in math and physics in 1928.¹ The photo to the right is a portrait of her from around this time. She went on to earn a master's degree from Yale University in 1930. 1930 is also the year that she married Vince Foster Hopper and took his name. In 1934, she earned a Ph.D. in math, also from Yale. In 1931, she began teaching math at Vassar, and was promoted in 1941 to associate professor. In 1940, shortly after World War II broke out, Hopper attempted to enlist in the U.S. Navy but was denied. At 34 years of age, she was considered too old. She was finally able to enlist in the Navy Reserve in 1943.²

Once in the Navy Reserve, Hopper volunteered to serve with the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service)³, which was the women's branch of the Reserve during the war. In December of 1943, she began attending the Naval Reserve Midshipman's School in Massachusetts. She graduated in 1944 as a lieutenant, junior grade² and joined the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University. It was shortly after this, in 1945, that Hopper divorced her husband Vince Foster Hopper.² She never remarried and chose to keep his name after the divorce. As part of her work for the Bureau of Ships Computation Project, Hopper worked on IBM's Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, known today as the Mark I.³ The Mark I was used late in the war to do calculations for the Manhattan Project.

Hopper continued to work at the Harvard Computation lab until 1949.¹ Her next role was at Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, on the team that was creating UNIVAC I. At that time, computer programs were written in a language called assembly, which used symbols and short mnemonics to represent the commands the computer should perform. Grace Hopper envisioned a programming language based on English words that could be run through some process that would translate it into a language the computer could understand. This process came to be known as a "compiler", and the concept was at first dismissed by her colleagues (see image at right). Hopper was undeterred and created the compiler anyway⁴, and even this working example was ignored by her coworkers. Again, Hopper continued and her work went on to become the COmmon Business-Oriented Language, or COBOL.⁴ COBOL allowed for using more intuitive language and made the field more accessible.

Here is an example of COBOL code:

ADD 1 TO x
ADD 1, a, b TO x ROUNDED, y, z ROUNDED

ADD a, b TO c
    ON SIZE ERROR
        DISPLAY "Error"
END-ADD

ADD a TO b
    NOT SIZE ERROR
        DISPLAY "No error"
    ON SIZE ERROR
        DISPLAY "Error"
                    

(This code was copied from the Wikipedia page on COBOL) Even a non-programmer can get a sense of what is happening here.

Hopper continued to work to improve standard and practices within the Navy and the U.S. government over the remainder of her professional career. Hopper first retired from the Navy Reserve in 1966.⁴ She was later recalled to active duty and retired a few times (in 1971 and 1985). After retirement, Grace traveled widely and lectured on her experiences and the history of computing. During this team, she is reported to have said, "If you ask me what accomplishment I’m most proud of, the answer would be all the young people I’ve trained over the years; that’s more important than writing the first compiler."¹ Hopper believed that the computer science field needed young people and their new ideas in order to keep moving forward. Grace Hopper died of natural causes in 1992.² She was 85 years old.