Grace Murray Hopper

On this date in 1906, Grace Murray Hopper, a computer scientist and US Navy Rear Admiral, was born in New York, New York. Hopper earned a PhD in math from Yale and taught at Vassar University until she joined the US Navy Reserve during WW2 where she worked on IBM’s Harvard Mark I computer. After the war, continuing to work under contract with the Navy, she joined the team that developed the UNIVAC I (first photo), where she wrote the world’s first programming language compiler. Her work led to some of the first compiler-based programming languages and was influential in the development of COBOL and FORTRAN. Late in her career she was a frequent lecturer and became well-known for using 11.8" (30 cm) lengths of telephone cable to illustrate the distance light travels in a nanosecond. (Image credits: unknown/Smithsonian Institution; US Navy/James S. Davis)

Date in History: 9 December 1906