Grace Murray Hopper

Parents Grace Murray Hopper was born as Grace Brewster Murray to Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Horne Murray. Her father was a successful insurance salesman despite having had his legs amputated. He defied the odds by living into his seventies.

Birth Date and Siblings Hopper was on December 9, 1906. She had two younger siblings, Mary and Roger. As a child she was so curious she took apart clocks to learn how to put them back together. One day she took apart seven clocks! Her mother finally told her she could only take apart one clock at a time.

Birthplace Grace Brewster Murray was born in Manhattan, better known as New York City. It makes sense that someone who would effect the world so much would be born in what is today the world’s largest city.

Childhood Education Murray’s father taught her that women should have the same education as men. For lower levels of education she went to two private schools for girls, Graham School and Schoonmakers School, both in New York City. Even though they were all-girl schools they still allowed Murray to participate in sports like basketball.

Higher Education At first, Murray could not enter her college of choice after failing the Latin Exam for admission. She attended to Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey for a year until she retook and passed the examination for Vassar. Murray entered Vassar University at the age of 17 and received her BA (1924) in Mathematics and Physics from there. After that she received her MA (1928) and Ph. D. (1934) in Mathematics at Yale while teaching at Vassar. In between those times (1930) she married Vincent Foster Hopper, who she divorced the year he died in WWII but still kept his name.

Invention Hopper invented the compiler. That is “software that converts a set of high-level language statements into a lower-level representation.” It also refers to “software that translates a program written in a high-level programming language (C/C++, COBOL, etc.) into machine language.”

Benefits to Today’s Society "With a compiler, programmers could prepare in five minutes a program that formerly would have taken a month to write. Compilers also made programming more accurate because they prevented the mistakes that occurred when people typed in the same programming routines over and over" (Yount 31). Many of the things we take for granted in today’s society, such as easy access to information, come from computers. Without the compiler our use of that tool would be much more limited than it currently is.

Advances/Developments due to Invention The invention of the compiler lead to the invention of the Flowmatic computer language. This language allowed programmers to understand their programs by translating computer terms to human language. “Flowmatic was the first computer language to use English words for both the data to be operated on and the instructions for the operation" (Yount 31).

Enhancement of Development Remington Rand developed a varying form of Flowmatic for commercial use. The UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) was the first computer for this use and lead to the advanced computers almost everyone has access to in America today.

Death and Burial Grace Murray Hopper died January 1, 1992 in Alexandria, Virginia. Hopper had wanted to die after 1999 to live out the century but missed by exactly eight years. She was buried in the Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper “Amazing Grace”

Citations http://members.fortunecity.com/jonhays/Hopper.html http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Hopper.Danis.html http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/hopper.htm http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/compiler.html http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jhtml?term=compiler&x=&y= http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/hopper.html Yount, Lisa. "Grace Murray Hopper." Contemporary Women Scientist. New York: Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group, 1994. 26-37.