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Badass Scientist of the Week: Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper (1906–1992) was a pioneer computer scientist who primarily helped to develop programming languages. She graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in mathematics in 1928, then went on to teach at Vassar while simultaneously earning her MA and PhD. She came from a military family, and so it was not surprising when she left her position of associate professor in to join the United States Naval Reserve. In 1944, she was appointed to a research team at Harvard University to work on the electromechanical Mark I computing machine. Her main aim was to create a program called the compiler to translate English language instructions into the language of the computer—she realised in order to give computers a larger audience, programming languages must be developed so that anyone could program them. In 1949, Hopper join the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation to provide businesses with computers, and began to work on the first large-scale electronic digital computer. She later returned to the Navy as a leader in the Naval Data Automation Command, and after she retiring from the Navy, she became a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation and worked well into her eighties. She died in 1992 and was buried with full Naval honours. Her visionary contributions to computer science were vital to the sophisticated computers we know today, but Hopper felt her greatest contribution had been “all the young people I’ve trained.”

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