She earned a PhD in mathematics from Yale in 1934, but by 1943, she had joined the Navy’s WWII-era women’s division (called WAVES) and graduated at the head of her class. She was 34.
She first served as a Lieutenant in a computer science project, but asked to be transferred to the regular Navy at the close of the war (she was refused). In addition to a successful academic and private industry career, she continued to serve the Navy in the Reserves until 1986 (when she was 80).
from Wikipedia
A list of her professional accomplishments:
- She is a recipient of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Department of Defense’s highest noncombat award
- While working for Remington Rand Corporation she was the director of teams that created the first compiler-based computer programming languages.
- She was a subject matter expert to the team (filled with her former employees ands students) that built on her earlier work and polished a new programming language called COBOL, which became the most widely used programming language for years.
- In 1969, When the Data Processing Management Association decided to start awarding a “Man of the Year”, they chose Dr. Hopper as their first recipient.
- In the 70s, she began her work on computer programming language standardization. Most of her work on this was done in the Navy, but it lead to standardization of programming language standards across the industry- a major development in the history of computing, software development, and the advent of computers for personal and everyday business use.
- She is often attributed as the inventor of the term “debugging”. At the very least, she popularized the term after her team at Harvard found a moth in their computer in 1947.
- It is widely believed that she originated the saying, “It is often easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”
- From Wikipedia, on her famous “nanoseconds” visual aid: “People (such as generals and admirals) used to ask her why satellite communication took so long. She started handing out pieces of wire which were just under one foot long, which is the distance that light travels in one nanosecond…contrasting them with a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long, representing a microsecond. Later, while giving these lectures while working for DEC, she passed out packets of pepper which she called picoseconds.”
Adm. Hopper was famous for her insistence that computers should be small, an idea that (along with her code standardization) lead to the personal computer. Her ideas have even credited as the genesis of the “Information Age” in general. There are various groups of women in the computer science field that belong to groups named in her honor, or study in buildings or programs named after her. A conference is held in her honor every year. You can find out more about it here: http://ghcbloggers.blogspot.com/ and here: http://gracehopper.org/2010/.
Grace Hopper’s gravesite can be found at the Arlington National Cemetery.
Credit to the service!