Hopper

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper

Born: 9 Dec 1906 in New York, USA
Died: 1 Jan 1992 in Arlington, Virginia, USA

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Grace Hopper studied at Vassar College and Yale, then joined the Naval Reserve in 1943. From 1944 she worked with Aiken on the Harvard Mark I computer. It was while working on this project that she coined the term 'bug' for a computer fault. The original 'bug' was a moth which caused a hardware fault in the Mark I.

In 1949 Hopper joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation where she designed an improved compiler. She was part of the team which developed Flow-Matic, the first English-language data-processing compiler.

Hopper was named the first computer science Man of the Year by the Data Processing Management Association in 1969. In 1991 she was awarded the National Medal of Technology.

Other Web sites:

Edtech Vermont, USA
Washington DC, USA

References:

  1. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. C W Billings, Grace Hopper : Navy admiral and computer pioneer (Hillside, 1989).
  3. L S Grinstein and P J Campbell (eds.), Women of Mathematics (Westport, Conn., 1987), 67-73.
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JOC/EFR February 1996