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Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USN (covered).jpg Photo by James S. Davis – Wikimedia Commons
Top 10 Interesting Facts about Grace Hopper
1. Life Before Success
At the age of 16, Grace was initially rejected for early admission to Vassar College, but she was admitted the following year. She graduated Phu Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics and earned her master’s degree at Yale University in 1930.
Grace began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931 and was promoted to associate professor in 1941. In 1934, Grace earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale. Her dissertation New Types of Irreducibility Criteria was published that same year.
2. Her Career in The U.S. Navy Reserve
In 1943, she obtained a leave of absence from Vassar and was sworn into the United States Navy Reserve, she was one of many women who volunteered to serve in the WAVES. Grace reported in December and trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School at Smith College in Massachusetts. Grace graduated top of her class in 1944 and was assigned to the Bureau of the Ships Computation Project at Harvard University.
Grace served on the Mark I computer programming staff headed by Howard H. Aiken. Grace and Howard co-authored three papers on the Mark I which is also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Grace remained at the Harvard Computation Lab until 1949.
3. Her Work at UNIVAC
Grace Hopper and UNIVAC.jpg Photo by Unknown (Smithsonian Institution) – Wikimedia Commons
In 1949, Grace became an employee of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician and joined the team developing the UNIVAC I. Grace also served as UNIVAC director of Automatic Programming Development for Remington Rand. The UNIVAC was the first known large-scale electronic computer to be on the mark at processing information that the Mark I.
Grace’s idea of a new programming language that would use entirely English words was not accepted for three years. During those years, she published her first paper on the subject. In the early 1950s, the company was taken over by the Remington Rand corporation. The program was known as the A compiler and its first version was A-0.
In 1954, Grace was named the company’s first director of automatic programming. At the beginning of that year, Grace’s work was influenced by the Laning and Zierler system which was the first compiler to accept algebraic notation as input.
4. COBOL
In 1959, Grace served as a technical consultant to the committee and many of her former employees served on the short-term committee that defined the new language COBOL which was an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language. The new language extended Grace’s FLOW-MATIC language with some ideas from the IBM equivalent.
Grace believed that programs should be written in a language that was close to English rather than machine code and was captured in the new business language. From 1967 to 1977, she served as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Groups in the Navy’s Office of Information Systems Planning.
5. On-Off Retirement
Grace Hopper College 01.jpg Photo by Farragutful – Wikimedia Commons
At the end of 1966, Grace retired from the Naval Reserve in accordance with Navy attrition regulations. She retired at the age of 60, she was however recalled to active duty in August 1967 for a six-month period that turned into an indefinite assignment. She retired again in 1971 but was again asked to return to active duty in 1972. In 1973, Grace was promoted to captain by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.
She remained on active duty for several years beyond mandatory retirement by special approval of Congress. On November 8, 1985, the rank of commodore was renamed rear admiral and Grace became one of the Navy’s few female admirals.
At the time of her actual retirement, she was labeled the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the United States Navy. She was at the age of 79, and her retirement ceremony was aboard the oldest commissioned ship in the United States Navy.
Admiral Hopper was the first ever person to be profiled twice on 60 minutes, first in March of 1983, and the second on 24 August 1986.
6. Life After Retirement
After retirement from the Navy, she was hired as a senior consultant at Digital Equipment Corporation. She was initially offered a position by Rita Yavinsky but she insisted on going through the typical formal interview process. She was hired as a full-time Principal Corporate Consulting Engineer, a tech-track SVP equivalent.
At Digital Equipment Corporate, she served primarily as a goodwill ambassador. She lectured widely about the early days of computing, her career, and on efforts that computer vendors could take to make life easier for their users. Although she was no longer a serving officer, she always wore her Navy full dress uniform to the lectures contrary to the U.S. Department of Defense policy.
Grace retained that position until her death at age 85 in 1992.
7. All of Her Awards
Grace Hopper being promoted to Commodore.JPEG Photo by Pete Souza – Wikimedia Commons
During her time in the Navy, she was awarded multiple awards like the Defense Distinguished Service Medal in 1986, the Legion of Merit in 1967, the American Campaign Medal in 1944, the World War II Victory Medal in 1945, the Armed Forces Reserve Medal with two bronze hourglass devices in 1963, 1973, and 1983.
Outside of the army, she was awarded and honored in more ways than one. In 1964, Grace was awarded the Society of Women Engineers. In May 1955, Grace was one of the founding members of the same society. In 1969, she was awarded the inaugural Data Processing Management Association Man of the Year Award. It is now known as the Distinguished Information Sciences Award.
Grace has been awarded so many awards even after her death.
8. Legacy Left Behind
Grace was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities worldwide during her lifetime. Aside from that, the recent generation is finding more ways to share her great story, for example, there is an upcoming documentary called Born With Curiosity: The Grace Hopper Story. Aside from that, Nvidia Corporation is naming its upcoming CPU generation Grace and GPU generation Hopper after her.
The Navy honored her by naming one of its service centers, Hopper Information Services Center. The Navy also named a guided-missile destroyer Hopper after her.
9. Honored In Popular Culture
In one of Gene Luen Yang’s comic book series, the main character is named Hopper Gracie-Hu which honors Grace in the current generation. Since 2013, Grace’s official portrait has been included in the C as sample data to replace the controversial Lenna image.
10. Personal Life
Grace Hopper.jpg Photo by James S. Davis – Wikimedia Commons
In 1930, Grace Murray married Vincent Foster Hopper who was a New York University. They divorced in 1945. Although she did not marry again, she retained his surname. Everything about her life was hidden from the outside or was overshadowed by her amazing work in both the Navy Reserve and UNIVAC.
On New Year’s Day 1992, Grace died in her sleep in her home in Arlington County, Virginia. She was 85 years of age. Grace was interred with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
