Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was born in New York City, New York. She was a curious child with technological tendencies who loved to dismantle alarm clocks and other household goods to see how they worked. Growing up, she attended private schools, and at 17, she started studying mathematics and physics at Vassar College. After graduating from Phi Beta Kappa, she attended Yale University, receiving her M.A degree in 1930. This same year, at 24, she married Vincent Foster Hopper, keeping the name Hopper after they divorced 15 years later.
In the following year, she returned to Vassar as a math teacher while continuing her education at Yale, and in 1934 she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, becoming one of the first women to receive a doctorate in this field.
In 1941, when the US entered WW2, the 34-year-old Hopper tried to enlist in the Navi but was rejected because of her age and low weight-to-height ratio. After two years, she applied again and got accepted into the United States Navy (women) Reserve. She took a leave of absence from Vassar and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University. There, she joined the staff who worked on Mark I computer – the first large-scale automatic calculator and co-authored its guidebook, A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.
After the war, Hopper stayed at the Harvard Computation Lab for a few more years as a civilian research fellow. In 1949, at 43, she was hired by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. as a head programmer. In this position, she worked on the design of UNIVAC I – the first general-purpose electronic digital computer for business applications and the first large-scale electronic commercial computer. At the time, Hopper recommended developing a programing language that would use English words which later will be translated into code by the computer. After having her initiative rejected, she published a paper about it in 1952, coining the term Compiler to describe the process.
It took five more years and a change of management, and in 1957, under the Sperry Rand Corp., Hopper, who was now the first director of automatic programming, oversaw the development of the Flow-Matic – the first English-like data-processing compiler. This programing language has inspired the development of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) in 1960. Over the next decade, Hopper promoted the new language, which gradually was adapted, becoming the most used programming language in the world by the 1970s.
While working in the private sector, Hopper maintained her naval career as a reservist until 1966, when she reached 60 and had to retire. It took less than a year before the Navy recalled her to active duty to help standardize its computer languages. In 1971, she retired for the second time, and again, she was asked to return in the following year. In 1973, at the age of 67, Hopper was promoted from commander to captain, and in 1983, to the rank of commodore, which two years later incorporated into rear admiral, becoming one of the Navy’s few women in this rank. Hopper, the oldest serving officer in the Navy, retired from the service for the third time in 1985 at the age of 79.
Afterward, she was hired as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, where she mainly served as a goodwill ambassador, giving lectures about computing, its early development, and future potential. In 1991, she became the first woman to be awarded the National Medal of Technology. She died the following year, at the age of 85.
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