Grace Hopper

1. Biography

Education & History

The daughter of Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne, Grace Brewster Murray was born in 1906 in New York City. She was a pioneering computer scientist, a U.S. Navy rear admiral and a trailblazer for women in technology because of her contributions to computer programming, software development, and the design and implementation of programming languages. She came of age at a time of unusual opportunity for women. Between 1920 and 1930 there were a rather high number of women receiving their doctorates in the United States, a number that would only be matched again in the 80s. World War II also created opportunities for women to enter the workforce in greater numbers. Nonetheless, Hopper’s success in a male-dominated field and organizations, including the U.S. Navy, was exceptional.

Growing up in New York City, Hopper showed a strong aptitude for Math and Science from a very early age. This interest would eventually lead to her earning her bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Vassar College in 1928. Two years later she pursued her Master's degree in Mathematics from Yale University and then continued her Ph.D. at the same institution while teaching mathematics at Vassar. During a one-year sabbatical from Vassar, Hopper studied with the famous mathematician Richard Courant at New York University. By 1934, she became one of the first women to achieve a doctorate in math from Yale.

2. Hoppers Contributions to Discrete Mathematics & Computer Science

Harvard Mark I

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II, Hopper decided to join the war effort. She was initially rejected because of her age and diminutive size, but she persisted and eventually received a waiver to join the U.S. Naval Reserve. In December 1943, she took a leave of absence from Vassar, where she was an associate professor, and completed sixty days of intensive training at the Midshipmen’s School for Women at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. After receiving her commission, Hopper was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University. There, she joined a team working on the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, better known as the MARK I, the first electromechanical computer in the United States.

Under the guidance of Howard Aiken, who had developed the MARK I, Hopper and her colleagues worked on top-secret calculations essential to the war effort—computing rocket trajectories, creating range tables for new anti-aircraft guns, and calibrating minesweepers. Her innate ability to communicate effectively with the managerial department and operations department was crucial for productivity. She would routinely report the status and capabilities of the MARK I[BrMI] to managers and break down orders to the operators to reconfigure MARK I to perform new set of tasks. Aiken took notice of this unmatched precision of words and directed her with the task of writing a book on the history and operation of the Harvard Mark I, which is now referred to as the first programming manual[LtrM].

With this new challenge at hand she began to dissimilate all the possible mathematical formulas and partition them into smaller steps. "You simply step by step told the computer what to do. Get this number and add it to that number and put the answer there. Now pick up this number and multiply it by this number and put it there."[ArchI]. This method of analyzing complex mathematical problems and transforming them into simple concise instructions helped her and her team to make MARK I the easiest to configure computers of its time, and would lead to her breakthrough for the computer science community.

UNIVAC I A-O & FLOW-MATIC

From 1946 to 1949, she continued to work on the MARK II and MARK III computers under Navy contracts. At the end of her three-year term as a research fellow, she left Harvard because there were no permanent positions for women. She joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician. There she helped lead a software team to develop the first electronic computer for businesses, UNIVAC 1[WikiCmp]. Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation was shortly after acquired and even reformed to the Remington Rand Company yet the goal remained, the completion of UNIVAC I.

A key difficulty that they faced was the high level of complexity of breaking down instructions into binary for a computer to execute. May 1952, Grace Hopper's team created the first compiler, name A-0[A-O]. A-0 took mathematical operations and assigned them a specific numerical value. After an operation was identified the values of the mathematical problem were then taken in to be computed. This revolutionary program was the key to bringing computers to the hands of businesses who needed a fast way of running simple mathematical operations.

A-0 was just the beginning for Hopper. Though it is known for being the first compiler made it functioned more like a simple loader which took in programs for the computer to run through. Advancement was needed and as Hopper and her team expanded their ability to create more accessible programming languages, FLOW-MATIC was finalized. This programming language was the first to implement English words that could be transformed into tasks a computer could execute. The idea of talking to a computer with human language was an outlandish idea.

"Over these years I've had a lot do with computers. I've driven a large number of people at least partially nuts. After all, insisting on talking to computers in plain English was a totally ridiculous idea and you couldn't do that. Except it worked."[CHM].

Yet it was made feasible by the spirit of Hopper and her team. FLOW-MATIC paved the way for COBOL and many of the now widely used programming languages of todays time. As we continue to advance our capabilities with computers we will always look back at Grace Hopper for her many feats in life, mathematics, and computer science.

3. Reflections on the constructed nature of the digital world.

While researching Grace Hopper we had many sources to read from. The sheer amount of articles written on her history is a testament to the impact she has made to the computer science industry. Many of these sources repeated the same key historical events which made for a reliable picture of who Grace Hopper was. Alongside the plentiful articles written about her Grace Hopper herself was a prolific speaker. She has made appearances on television shows such as Letterman and 60 Minutes and video lectures archived by museums. This helped us better understand Hopper's personality over plain text describing her accomplishments. Even for other renown mathematicians and computer scientists this would not always hold true.

References

[GHU] The photo was taken in 2004, by Smithsonian Institution. Its use is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

BrGH Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopedia (2024, January 1). Grace Hopper. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Grace-Hopper

[BrMI] Freiberger, P. A. and Swaine, . Michael R. (2014, December 18). Harvard Mark I. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/technology/Harvard-Mark-I

[A-O] Hopper, G. M. (1952). The Education of a Computer. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/609784.609818

[ArchI] Isaacson, W. (2014, December 3). New York: Simon & Schuster. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. https://archive.org/details/innovatorshowgro0000isaa_p2p3

[CHM] Computer History Museum. (2022, October 26). Howard Aiken and the Harvard Mark I, lecture by Grace Hopper [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/n0RNcAPy87Y?si=6fx-GqDBirp47NTD&t=3070

[LtrM] Letterman. (2022, October 26). Grace Hopper is the computer Queen | Letterman [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2uls6iIEU

[WikiCmp] Wikipedia contributors. (2024, January 20). UNIVAC i. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_I