Grace Hopper was born in 1906 in New York City, and studied mathematics and physics, earning a PhD in mathematics from Yale University in 1934, a rare achievement for a woman at the time. She joined the US Naval Reserve in 1943 during World War II, and was assigned to work on one of the first large electromechanical computers at Harvard University, the Mark I.
In that early era, computers were programmed in complex binary machine code understood only by a handful of specialists. In 1952, Hopper developed the first «compiler» in history, a program capable of translating instructions written in near-English language into machine code the computer could execute, a revolutionary idea many of her colleagues considered nearly impossible at the time.
From COBOL to «Mother of Computing»
Hopper's innovation paved the way for developing COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages designed specifically for business applications, which she helped design, and which remained in use in financial and banking systems worldwide for decades. She is also credited with popularizing the term «bug» after her team found an actual moth trapped inside an early computer. She retired from the Navy as a rear admiral at age eighty, becoming its oldest serving officer at the time, and a US Navy destroyer was later named in her honor.
