98 Fun Facts About Grace Hopper

Where was Grace Hopper born in 1906?

Grace Hopper was born in New York City on 9 December 1906; her father Walter was an insurance broker, and the family spent summers at a house in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire.

What was Grace Hopper's maiden name?

She married NYU professor Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930, divorced in 1945 and kept his surname.

How many alarm clocks did the young Grace dismantle at age 7 before her mother caught on?

Seven alarm clocks were taken apart by the seven-year-old Grace, who wanted to see how they worked, before her mother noticed and limited her to dismantling just one.

Why did Hopper keep a clock on her wall that ran counterclockwise?

To fight people's allergy to change, she said: humans love to say 'we've always done it this way', so she kept a clock that ran counterclockwise as a daily reminder.

Why was Hopper initially rejected for early admission to college at 16?

Her Latin scores were too low on the entrance exam, so she was turned away at 16; admitted a year later, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics and physics in 1928.

From which university did Hopper earn her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1934?

Her dissertation, New Types of Irreducibility Criteria, was supervised by Oystein Ore.

At which college was Hopper a professor of mathematics before joining the Navy?

Vassar hired her as a mathematics instructor in 1931 while she finished her doctorate, and promoted her to associate professor in 1941, two years before she left for the Navy.

Which women's Navy Reserve organisation did Hopper join in 1943?

WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) took her in December 1943 on a leave of absence from teaching, after she had first been rejected as too old at 34 and underweight.

How far below the Navy's 120-pound minimum was Hopper when she needed an exemption to be commissioned?

15 lb under the 120-pound minimum, at 105 pounds, she needed a waiver to be sworn in; she then graduated first in her midshipmen's class in 1944.

Which early electromechanical computer did Hopper program from 1944?

The team was led by Howard H. Aiken, and she co-authored three papers on the machine with him.

What was the alternative name of the electromechanical computer Hopper programmed at Harvard?

Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was IBM's official name for the Harvard machine; Hopper wrote its user manual, A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, published in 1946.

Which Manhattan Project scientist initiated one of the first programs run on the Mark I in March 1944?

John von Neumann, then working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, ran implosion calculations on the Harvard machine from 29 March 1944 to test whether implosion could detonate the bomb.

According to Hopper's famous maxim, what is easier than getting permission?

Asking forgiveness is the answer: in a 1986 interview with the Navy magazine Chips Ahoy she said 'It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission', a line innovators still quote.

Which company did Hopper join in 1949 to work on the UNIVAC I?

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, set up by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in Philadelphia, hired her in 1949; Remington Rand bought the firm in 1950, and she did her compiler work under that owner.

What distinction does the UNIVAC I hold in computing history?

The first US general-purpose electronic computer for business, the UNIVAC I used UNISERVO metal-tape drives, the first commercial magnetic tape units, and 46 machines were built in all.

Which US body accepted the first UNIVAC on 31 March 1951?

The Census Bureau accepted the first UNIVAC on 31 March 1951, though the machine stayed at the factory for a time; the fifth unit, built for the Atomic Energy Commission, was CBS's election-night computer in 1952.

What objection did Hopper meet when she first proposed a programming language built from ordinary words?

That computers didn't understand English was the reply, she recalled, when she first pitched keyword programming; she persisted, and her FLOW-MATIC compiler later proved the idea on the UNIVAC.

What was the name of the first version of Hopper's compiler, operational in 1952?

A-0 ran on the UNIVAC I in 1952; it worked more like a loader or linker than a modern compiler, and she complained that nobody would touch her running compiler.

What did colleagues insist computers could only do, when they dismissed Hopper's compiler?

Arithmetic was all computers could do, they told her; she said she had a running compiler and nobody would touch it because a machine could not possibly write programs.

What title was Hopper given at her company in 1954?

First director of automatic programming was her title from 1954 at Remington Rand's UNIVAC division, where her department produced the MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC compilers.

What was FLOW-MATIC originally called?

B-0 (Business Language version 0) was the original name of FLOW-MATIC, the first English-like data processing language, developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand from 1955 onward.

What does the acronym COBOL stand for?

Common Business-Oriented Language is the expansion; COBOL was designed for business, finance and administrative data processing, with English-like verbs such as ADD and MOVE meant to be readable by non-programmers.

At which two-day conference in spring 1959 was COBOL defined?

CODASYL, the Conference on Data Systems Languages, brought industry and government computer experts together; Hopper was its technical consultant and several of her former staff sat on the short-term committee that wrote COBOL.

Which IBM language contributed ideas to COBOL alongside Hopper's FLOW-MATIC?

COMTRAN, IBM's Commercial Translator designed by Bob Bemer, supplied ideas such as the PICTURE clause to COBOL, which otherwise drew mainly on FLOW-MATIC.

What nickname did Hopper earn for her association with the business language?

Grandma COBOL was the nickname, because the business language drew heavily on her FLOW-MATIC; she was also called 'Amazing Grace', and her lively, irreverent talks made her a sought-after speaker.

What example did Hopper give of a plain-English COBOL statement?

'Subtract income tax from pay' was her example: she said she could write that in plain English instead of trying to express it in octal code or a string of symbols.

What did Hopper's associates find stuck in a relay of the Mark II computer in 1947?

A moth was pulled from Relay #70 of the Mark II at Harvard and taped into the logbook with the note 'First actual case of bug being found'; Hopper loved retelling the story.

Which museum holds the remains of the famous 1947 computer bug?

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds the Mark II logbook page with the taped-in insect; the word 'bug' for a fault predates it, with Edison using it in the 1870s.

How long were the pieces of wire Hopper handed out to represent a nanosecond?

About 11.8 inches (30 cm) is how far light travels in a vacuum in one nanosecond, so each wire showed the farthest a signal could go; a 984-foot coil stood for a microsecond.

What did Hopper hand out to represent picoseconds in her later lectures?

Packets of pepper came later: she called each grain a picosecond, a thousandth of a nanosecond, to make the point that computers had to be small to be fast.

What question from generals and admirals prompted Hopper's nanosecond visual aid?

Why satellite communication took so long was what the brass kept asking her; the wires showed that even light needs time, and she added that signals move more slowly through real wire than through a vacuum.

At what rank did Hopper first retire from the Naval Reserve at the end of 1966?

Commander was her rank when she retired from the Naval Reserve on 31 December 1966, aged 60; the Navy recalled her to active duty the following August for what became an indefinite assignment.

Which admiral promoted Hopper to captain in 1973?

Elmo Zumwalt Jr., then Chief of Naval Operations, promoted her to captain in 1973; she had retired a second time in 1971 and been asked back to active duty in 1972.

Which TV programme's 1983 segment on Hopper prompted a congressman to push for her promotion?

60 Minutes ran the profile in 1983; Illinois Republican Philip Crane saw it and pushed a joint resolution through the House to make her commodore by special presidential appointment.

Which president promoted Hopper to commodore in December 1983?

Ronald Reagan promoted her to commodore in a White House ceremony on 15 December 1983, by special presidential appointment after the House passed Philip Crane's joint resolution.

How old was Hopper when she finally retired from the Navy in August 1986?

79 was her age at the 14 August 1986 ceremony, which made her the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the US Navy at the time.

Aboard which ship was Hopper's retirement ceremony held in Boston?

USS Constitution, the Navy's oldest commissioned warship, launched in 1797, hosted the ceremony, where she received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the department's highest non-combat award.

Which company hired Hopper as a senior consultant after she left the Navy?

Digital Equipment Corporation hired her as a senior consultant in 1986, a post she held until her death in 1992, mainly as a goodwill ambassador lecturing at its engineering facilities and to customers.

What did Hopper always wear to her post-retirement lectures, contrary to Defense Department policy?

Her Navy full dress uniform was what she wore to every lecture, though she was no longer a serving officer; she generally received a standing ovation at the company's engineering facilities.

What did Hopper say was her most important accomplishment other than building the compiler?

Training young people, she said, was her most important accomplishment after the compiler: they would ask 'Do you think we can do this?' and she would say 'Try it' and back them up.

Where is Grace Hopper buried?

Arlington National Cemetery received her with full military honours after she died in her sleep at her Arlington, Virginia home on 1 January 1992.

Which honour did President Obama award Hopper posthumously in November 2016?

The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour, was awarded to her posthumously on 22 November 2016, in the same ceremony that honoured Margaret Hamilton and Bill Gates.

How many honorary degrees was Hopper awarded during her lifetime?

40 honorary degrees came her way from universities around the world during her lifetime, alongside Navy decorations including the Meritorious Service Medal and the Legion of Merit.

What type of Navy warship is the USS Hopper, named for her?

Arleigh Burke destroyer DDG-70, nicknamed 'Amazing Grace', was launched in January 1996 and commissioned at San Francisco on 6 September 1997; she is homeported at Pearl Harbor.

Which chip company named its GPU architecture Hopper and CPU generation Grace after her?

Nvidia unveiled the Grace CPU in 2021 and the Hopper GPU architecture in 2022; NERSC's Cray XE6 supercomputer, installed in 2010, was also named Hopper.

What did Google name after Hopper in 2020?

An undersea network cable named Grace Hopper was announced by Google in July 2020, linking the US east coast with Bude in Cornwall and Bilbao in Spain, Google's first private cable to the UK and Spain.

In which video game can players recruit Grace Hopper as a Great Admiral?

Civilization VI lists her among its Great Admirals of the Information Era; her official Navy portrait also serves as sample image data in the matplotlib Python library.

Who co-wrote Hopper's 1984 introductory textbook Understanding Computers?

Steven Mandell, an author of business-computing textbooks, co-wrote Understanding Computers with Hopper; West Publishing issued it in 1984 as an introductory text for college students.

What did the 2013 Google Doodle for Hopper's 107th birthday show her doing?

Using COBOL to print out her age is what the animated Doodle showed: she types a COBOL subtraction that outputs 107, and at the end a familiar insect flies out of the computer.

Which annual conference for women in computing was inspired by her legacy?

The Grace Hopper Celebration, started in 1994 by Anita Borg and Telle Whitney and run by AnitaB.org, gathers thousands of women technologists each year and is named in her honour.

Time's 100 Women of the Year project made Hopper the retroactive woman of which year?

1959 was her year: Time's 100 Women of the Year project, published in March 2020, created 89 new covers to name a woman for each year back to 1920, and picked Hopper for 1959.

Hopper Hall, the first service-academy building named for a woman, houses which department?

Cyber science and the Center for Cyber Security Studies occupy Hopper Hall, which opened at the Naval Academy in Annapolis in 2020; the Academy also owns a Cray XC-30 supercomputer named Grace.

Grace Hopper's great-grandfather, an admiral, fought in which Civil War engagement?

Mobile Bay, Farragut's August 1864 victory, was the battle in which her great-grandfather Alexander Wilson Russell served as a US Navy officer; the family's naval tradition shaped her own choice in 1943.

Grace Murray married Vincent Foster Hopper, a professor at which institution, in 1930?

New York University was where Vincent Foster Hopper taught English; the couple married in 1930, divorced in 1945, and she never remarried but kept his surname.

Where did Hopper attend the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School, graduating first in her class?

Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts hosted the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School for women; she graduated first in her class in 1944 and went straight to Harvard's Bureau of Ships Computation Project.

In 1969 Hopper received the inaugural 'Man of the Year' award from which organisation?

Data Processing Management Association gave her its first 'Computer Sciences Man of the Year' award in 1969; the prize was later renamed the Distinguished Information Sciences Award.

In 1973 Hopper became the first American made a Distinguished Fellow of which body?

British Computer Society made her a Distinguished Fellow in 1973, the first American and the first woman of any nationality to receive that fellowship.

Which honour did Hopper receive in 1991, the year before her death?

National Medal of Technology went to her in 1991 from President George H. W. Bush, the first woman to receive it individually, for programming languages that opened 'a significantly larger universe of users'.

On which late-night host's show did Hopper explain the nanosecond in 1986?

David Letterman had her on Late Night in October 1986, weeks after her retirement; she handed him a length of wire to explain a nanosecond and deadpanned that she joined the Navy because there was a war on.

How old was Grace Hopper when she died on New Year's Day 1992?

85 was her age: born on 9 December 1906, she had passed that birthday only weeks before she died in her sleep of natural causes on 1 January 1992.

In which New Jersey town did Hopper attend the Hartridge School?

Plainfield, New Jersey was home to the Hartridge School, a girls' school she left in 1924; it merged with the Wardlaw School in 1976 to form Wardlaw-Hartridge.

Hopper was the eldest of how many children?

Three children were born to Walter and Mary, and Grace was the eldest; her younger siblings were Mary and Roger, and the family attended West End Collegiate Church.

Hopper's parents were of Scottish descent and which other?

Her mother's maiden name, Van Horne, carried the family's Dutch line.

Besides age and weight, why else was Hopper first refused a Navy commission?

Her teaching was vital to the war effort, the Navy said, since mathematics professors were scarce; she got round it in 1943 by taking a leave of absence and volunteering for the Reserve.

At what rank was Hopper assigned to Harvard's Bureau of Ships Computation Project in 1944?

Lieutenant (junior grade) was her commission on graduating from midshipmen's school in June 1944; she reported to Howard Aiken's Harvard lab in July 1944, the start of a naval career that ran past four decades.

What did Hopper turn down in order to stay at Harvard's Computation Lab until 1949?

A full professorship at her old college was what she declined, staying at Harvard as a research fellow under a Navy contract until she left for the commercial computer world in 1949.

Who was a fellow first programmer of the Mark I with Hopper and Robert Campbell?

The small team that physically operated the machine was never told the overall purpose of its wartime work.

On what date in 1947 was the 'first actual case of bug being found' logged?

September 9, 1947 is the date on the Mark II logbook page, written at 15:45 by the crew who pulled the insect from Relay #70 and noted 'First actual case of bug being found'.

Which computer pioneer built and programmed the Mark II alongside Hopper under Aiken?

Edmund Berkeley, a Navy lieutenant later famous for the 1949 book Giant Brains and as a co-founder of the ACM, worked with Hopper on the relay-based Mark II, which could run as two half-machines.

The Mark II was delivered in 1948 to the Navy's proving ground in which place?

Dahlgren, Virginia, the Navy's proving ground on the Potomac, received the relay-based Mark II in 1948 for ballistics calculations; the machine used about 13,000 electromechanical relays.

Which wartime computer had the founders of Hopper's 1949 employer built at Penn?

ENIAC, completed at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School in 1945, was the work of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who quit Penn in 1946 over a policy demanding their patent rights.

Via Sperry Rand and a 1986 merger, Hopper's employer Remington Rand ultimately became which company?

Unisys was formed in 1986 when Burroughs bought Sperry, the renamed Sperry Rand, which had absorbed Remington Rand in 1955; the UNIVAC line lived on under the new name.

What job title did Hopper hold when she joined the UNIVAC team in 1949?

The machine she helped build became the first large-scale electronic computer on the market in 1951.

Under what marketing name was Hopper's A-3 compiler released?

ARITH-MATIC was Remington Rand's marketing name for the A-3 compiler, the last of the UNIVAC A-series; the algebraic AT-3 that followed was sold as MATH-MATIC.

Who directed The Queen of Code, the 2015 short documentary about Hopper?

Gillian Jacobs, the actress known for Community, directed The Queen of Code, a 16-minute documentary about Hopper's life released in 2015 in the Signals series.

How were data structures defined in FLOW-MATIC, unlike its English-like statements?

By filling in pre-printed forms was how FLOW-MATIC programmers described their data layouts; it was the first language to cleanly separate data description from operations, an idea COBOL's DATA DIVISION kept.

Who called the April 1959 Penn meeting on common business languages that Hopper attended?

Mary Hawes, a Burroughs computer scientist, convened the 8 April meeting at the University of Pennsylvania; it led to the Pentagon-sponsored committee that defined COBOL by the end of the year.

What share of COBOL 60 did Hopper claim in 1980 was really FLOW-MATIC?

95% of COBOL 60 was really FLOW-MATIC, she said in 1980, calling IBM's rival language's influence 'extremely small' and crediting it mainly to keep other people happy.

Hopper led which body in the Office of Information Systems Planning from 1967 to 1977?

Navy Programming Languages Group was the body she directed after her 1967 recall; there she built validation software to hold every Navy COBOL and FORTRAN compiler to one standard.

Which agency took over Hopper's language-conformance tests in the 1980s?

National Bureau of Standards, renamed NIST in 1988, assumed the tests and their administration in the 1980s; the Navy's suite had already pushed vendors' FORTRAN and COBOL dialects to converge.

In the 1970s Hopper urged the Defense Department to swap big centralized systems for what?

Networks of small distributed computers were her prescription: any user at any node could reach common databases over the network, an argument she made to the Pentagon years before such systems were normal.

Hopper's August 1967 recall to active duty was originally meant to last how long?

Six months was the planned length of the August 1967 recall to standardise Navy COBOL; it became indefinite, and she served nearly nineteen more years, to August 1986.

What rank did Hopper hold when she retired from the Navy in 1986?

Rear admiral (lower half) was her rank at retirement, the Navy having renamed the one-star commodore grade in 1985; Congress had approved her serving years past mandatory retirement age.

Jay Elliot said inside the 'all Navy' Hopper was what, 'dying to be released'?

A pirate, dying to be released, is what Jay Elliot said you found inside the 'all Navy' exterior; the Navy's own profile of her is titled 'Navy to the Core, a Pirate at Heart'.

Which organisation gave Hopper its Golden Gavel Award in 1988?

Toastmasters International presented its Golden Gavel, given each year to an outstanding communicator, to Hopper in 1988, fitting for a lecturer famed for irreverent war stories.

Which Irish poet dedicated the poem 'Code' to Hopper in 2001?

Eavan Boland, the Dublin-born poet who directed Stanford's creative writing programme, dedicated 'Code' to Hopper in her 2001 collection Against Love Poetry.

Which agency released a 1982 Hopper lecture in two parts in August 2024?

NSA published the two-part lecture on YouTube in August 2024 after a Freedom of Information request; the 1982 talk, 'Future Possibilities', had survived only on obsolete one-inch videotape.

Women at which company formed an employee group called 'Hoppers'?

Microsoft's women employees formed the Hoppers group, named in her honour, and it established a scholarship in her name for women studying computing.

Who was the first winner of the ACM's Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1971?

Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, took the first award in 1971; it recognises a single major contribution made before the age of 35.

What is the motto of the destroyer USS Hopper?

Aude et Effice, Latin for 'Dare and Do', is the motto of the destroyer DDG-70, chosen to reflect Hopper's own bold approach to her work.

At which shipyard was USS Hopper built?

Bath Iron Works, Maine laid her keel in February 1995 and launched her on 6 January 1996 as the 20th ship of her class, from the yard on the Kennebec River.

USS Hopper was the second US warship named for a Navy woman; the first honoured whom?

Lenah Higbee, superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps in the First World War and the first living woman awarded the Navy Cross, was honoured by the destroyer USS Higbee (DD-806) in 1945.

In January 2008 USS Hopper faced threatening gunboats from which country near Hormuz?

Iran's Revolutionary Guard speedboats closed to about 200 yards of Hopper, Port Royal and Ingraham on 6 January 2008, radioed 'You will explode after a few minutes', dropped white boxes in the water and left.

The H100 GPU on the architecture named for Hopper packs roughly how many transistors?

80 billion transistors on TSMC's 4N process go into the H100, announced in March 2022; demand in the AI boom was so fierce that Larry Ellison described 'an hour of sushi and begging' Jensen Huang for them with Elon Musk.

The residential college renamed for Hopper in 2017 had honoured which US vice-president?

John C. Calhoun, the slavery-defending South Carolinian who served as vice-president under Adams and Jackson, lost the college's name in February 2017 after years of student protest.

Which outlet produced the 2015 Hopper documentary The Queen of Code?

FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's data-journalism site, released The Queen of Code in 2015 as a short documentary on Hopper's life; Kurt Beyer had by then written a full-length biography of her.

Kathleen Broome Williams's 2004 biography calls Hopper 'Admiral of the' what?

Cyber Sea completes the title Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea, published by the Naval Institute Press in 2004; Williams had earlier profiled her in Improbable Warriors alongside Mary Sears, Florence van Straten and Mina Rees.

What was the title of Hopper's landmark May 1952 paper on compilers?

The Education of a Computer was presented at the ACM national meeting in Pittsburgh in May 1952; it argued that the computer itself could take over the clerical work of coding.