Grace Murray Hopper, born in New York City in 1906, was a pioneering mathematician and U.S. Navy officer. She joined the Naval Reserve in 1943 and was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard, where she worked on the Mark I, one of the first electromechanical computers .
Her groundbreaking work produced the first computer compiler in the 1950s, a tool that translated written instructions into machine code. This innovation paved the way for COBOL, a programming language still in use today for business and government systems .
Hopper served more than 40 years in uniform, becoming one of the Navy’s first female admirals before retiring in 1986 as a Rear Admiral . Nicknamed “Amazing Grace,” she was admired for her vision that computers should be accessible and useful to everyday people. Her famous story about finding a moth in a relay coined the enduring term “computer bug” .
Honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 and the USS Hopper named in her memory, Grace Hopper’s legacy endures as a trailblazer who changed both the Navy and the digital age .
