Grace Hopper was a computer scientist and inventor of the first compiler. She is also credited with coining the terms ‘bug’ and ‘de-bug’ as related to computer errors. She was born on December 9, 1906 in New York, United States.
She was one of the first computer programmers to work on the Harvard Mark I. Her father was Walter Fletcher Murray and her mother was Mary Campbell Van Horne. Grace was their eldest child.
Quick Facts: –
- Grace Hopper was educated privately at two conservative Presbyterian girls’ schools in New York: The Graham School and Miss Mary Schoonmaker’s School.
- From a very young age, she was unusually skilled at explaining difficult concepts in math and physics to other students.
- She graduated in 1928, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and physics. She was 21 years old at that time.
- She earned an MA in 1930 and a PhD in 1934 at Yale. She was one of four women in a doctoral program of ten students.
- As a child, she took apart seven alarm clocks just to figure out how they worked.
- She had reached the rank of Rear Admiral in the US Navy with a ship named after her.
- Her nickname was ‘Amazing Grace’ because of her high naval rank and myriad accomplishments.
- Grace is also famous for introducing the idea of debugging software.
- The Cray XE6 ‘Hopper’ supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center was named after her.
- Grace passed away on Jan 1st 1992 at the age of 85.
