92 Fun Facts About Grace Hopper

Where was Grace Hopper born in 1906?

New York City was home, and mathematics ran in the family: her mother loved the subject and passed that love on to Grace.

What was Grace Hopper's maiden name?

Murray was the name she was born with; she married Vincent Hopper in 1930 and went on using his surname after their divorce in 1945.

How did Hopper's mother respond when Grace dismantled the alarm clocks?

Allowed her just one: seven-year-old Grace had opened clock after clock to see how they worked, so her mother let her keep a single clock to practise on.

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 had to wait a year; once admitted, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1928.

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

Yale awarded her the mathematics doctorate in 1934, and in 2017 renamed one of its residential colleges in her honour.

At which college did Hopper teach mathematics before joining the Navy?

Vassar, her own college, put her on its mathematics staff in 1931; in December 1943 she took a leave of absence to join the Navy.

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

WAVES, short for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, swore her in during December 1943, after the Navy had at first turned her away.

As of 2025, the warship USS Hopper has its home port at which naval base?

Pearl Harbor is home to the ship; it was the 1941 attack there that made Hopper, then a mathematics professor, decide to join the Navy.

On Howard Aiken's orders, Hopper wrote the first what for Harvard's Mark I computer?

Computer manual: her 500-plus pages taught users to run and program the Mark I, and laid down principles of computer operation that outlasted the machine.

What was IBM's official name for the Harvard Mark I that Hopper programmed?

Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was the name IBM gave the machine it built for Harvard; the university's own label, Mark I, is the one that stuck.

Hopper's Mark I team ran bomb calculations in 1944 for which Manhattan Project scientist?

John von Neumann brought the problem from Los Alamos: would implosion work as a way to set off the plutonium bomb later dropped on Nagasaki?

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, a Philadelphia start-up, hired her in 1949; Remington Rand bought it the next year, and her compiler work was done under that owner.

What distinction does the UNIVAC I hold among American computers?

First designed for business use, the UNIVAC I kept its data on magnetic tape; Hopper's compilers were written so that data processors, not just mathematicians, could program it.

Which US government body was the first customer for the UNIVAC I in 1951?

The Census Bureau took the first UNIVAC I in 1951 and soon used it to tabulate part of the 1950 population count; the machine was dedicated at its makers' Philadelphia plant that June.

What objection met Hopper's proposal for a programming language written in 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 compiler Hopper had running on the UNIVAC I in 1952?

A-0 ran on the UNIVAC I in 1952 and worked more like a loader or linker than a modern compiler: it pulled stored subroutines off tape by call number and assembled them into a program.

What did sceptics tell Hopper computers could only do when she showed them a working compiler?

Arithmetic, they told her, was all a computer could do; 'I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it,' she recalled of 1952.

What title did Remington Rand's UNIVAC division give Hopper in the 1950s?

First director of automatic programming was her title; the department she ran released early compiled languages, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC among them.

What was FLOW-MATIC originally called?

B-0, short for Business Language version 0, was the working name; as FLOW-MATIC it let the UNIVAC follow English commands for jobs such as payroll and billing.

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.

Which consortium, born of a 1959 Pentagon meeting, oversaw the creation of COBOL?

CODASYL, the Conference on Data Systems Languages, drew in industry and government experts; Hopper advised it, and several of her former staff sat on the committee that wrote COBOL.

Which IBM business language lent 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 part in the birth of COBOL?

Grandma COBOL stuck because the language leaned so heavily on her FLOW-MATIC; the trade press has also called her its mother.

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

A moth was pulled from a relay 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 'nanosecond' wires Hopper handed out to show how far light travels in that time?

About 1 foot, 11.8 inches to be exact, is how far light travels in a billionth of a second; she used the wires to show why fast computers have to be small.

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

Packets of pepper came late in her lecturing career: each ground grain, she said, was a picosecond, a thousandth of the nanosecond her wires stood for.

Hopper's nanosecond wires answered admirals who kept asking her what?

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 age rules retired her from the Naval Reserve at the end of 1966, aged 60; the Navy recalled her the following August for what became an indefinite assignment.

Which Chief of Naval Operations promoted Hopper to captain in 1973?

Elmo Zumwalt Jr., the youngest man ever to head the Navy, promoted her to captain in 1973, when she was 66 and the rules had already retired her once.

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

60 Minutes sent Morley Safer to interview her; Illinois congressman Philip Crane saw the piece and introduced a bill to promote her, and by December she was a commodore.

Which president promoted Hopper to commodore?

Ronald Reagan hosted the ceremony at the White House on 15 December 1983; the new commodore, 77 that month, was four years older than the president.

When she retired in 1986, Hopper was the Navy's what?

Oldest active-duty officer, at 79: the Navy had retired her for age at 60, then called her back within months and kept extending her service.

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

USS Constitution, launched in 1797 and still in commission, hosted the ceremony; Hopper left it with the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.

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

Digital Equipment Corporation hired her as a senior consultant in 1986; she toured its plants and customers as a goodwill ambassador, lecturing well into her eighties.

In 1987 Hopper became the first Fellow of what is now which California museum?

The Computer History Museum made her its first Fellow, citing her programming languages, her standardisation work and her lifelong naval service.

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

Training young people mattered more to her, she said, than writing the first compiler; her standing advice to them was that a ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for.

Where is Grace Hopper buried?

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

Which honour was Hopper awarded posthumously in November 2016?

The Presidential Medal of Freedom came 24 years after her death; the White House hailed 'the first lady of software' for making coding languages more practical and accessible.

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

Arleigh Burke destroyer Hopper, christened in 1996 and nicknamed 'Amazing Grace', honours an officer the Navy had at first turned away as too old and too light.

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

Nvidia unveiled the Hopper architecture in March 2022 and pairs it with its Grace processors in a single module sold as the Grace Hopper Superchip.

What did Google name after Hopper in 2020?

An undersea network cable called Grace Hopper links the United States with Britain and Spain; it was the first to use fibre switching that lets Google steer traffic around outages.

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

Civilization VI makes her a Great Admiral of the Atomic era; retire her and the game hands the player a free technology.

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 computer scientist co-founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in 1994?

Anita Borg planned it over dinner with Telle Whitney, starting from a blank sheet of paper; 500 technical women came to the first one, in Washington in 1994.

Which magazine's 100 Women of the Year project named Hopper its woman of 1959?

Time made 89 new covers in 2020 to give a woman of the year to each year back to 1920; Hopper got 1959, the year COBOL was born.

Hopper Hall, opened at the US Naval Academy in 2020, houses which academic department?

Cyber science is taught in Hopper Hall, named for an officer who could never have studied at Annapolis: the Academy admitted no women until 1976.

Hopper's great-grandfather, a Navy admiral, fought under Farragut in which 1864 Civil War battle?

Mobile Bay was Farragut's victory of August 1864, and Alexander Russell served in it; eight decades later his example drew Grace to the Navy.

Hopper's 1928 bachelor's degree was in mathematics and which other subject?

Physics was her second major; she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and within three years was back at the same college as a mathematics instructor.

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

Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts housed the Navy's midshipmen's school for women; she finished top of her class in 1944 and was sent straight to Harvard's computing project.

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

Data Processing Management Association gave its first 'Man of the Year' award to a woman; a decade later the title was changed to 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, its first woman as well as its first American; seven years earlier the US Navy had retired her as too old.

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

National Medal of Technology came from President George Bush in 1991, for languages that 'opened the door to a significantly larger universe of users'; no woman had won it on her own before.

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

David Letterman had her on Late Night in October 1986, where she told how, at her White House promotion, she had informed the president: 'I'm older than you are.'

Hopper died in her sleep weeks after turning 85, on which holiday?

New Year's Day 1992 was the day; within five years the Navy had launched a warship bearing her name.

Hopper spent her childhood summers at a family cottage in Wolfeboro, on Lake Wentworth, in which state?

New Hampshire: Wolfeboro bills itself as the oldest summer resort in America, and her family were among the city people who spent the season at its lakes.

According to Hopper's maxim, you manage things, but what do you do with people?

Lead them: 'You manage things; you lead people,' she said at her 1986 retirement, and she complained elsewhere that America had gone overboard on management and forgotten leadership.

Arriving at Harvard in 1944, Hopper was ordered to get results from the Mark I by which deadline?

The following Thursday: Howard Aiken wanted arctangent coefficients, so a professor who had never programmed was handed a codebook and, as she told it, a week to learn the machine.

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

Her teaching was vital to the war effort, the Navy held; she got round it in 1943 by persuading her college to grant a leave of absence.

At what rank was Hopper sent to Harvard's Mark I computing project in 1944?

Lieutenant (junior grade) was her commission on leaving midshipmen's school; two years later the Navy refused her a regular commission because of her age, so she stayed on as a reservist.

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.

Roughly how long was the Harvard Mark I that Hopper programmed in 1944?

About 51 feet long and eight feet high, by her own account, yet the machine managed only three additions a second.

Which US national academy elected Hopper a member in 1973?

National Academy of Engineering took her in although she held no engineering degree: her master's and her doctorate were both in mathematics.

The Mark II that Hopper worked on was shipped from Harvard to the Navy's Potomac proving ground at which place?

Dahlgren, Virginia put the relay machine to work on ballistics for naval guns, and went on to house later giants such as the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator.

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

ENIAC, completed at Penn in 1945, was the work of two engineers who resigned the next year to start the company that later hired Hopper.

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

Unisys was created in 1986 when Burroughs bought Sperry, which had absorbed Remington Rand in 1955; Hopper's UNIVAC line passed to the new company.

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

Senior mathematician was the post she took in 1949: Harvard had offered her no permanent place, so she joined a Philadelphia start-up that meant to sell computers to businesses.

Which TV network used a UNIVAC from Hopper's company to forecast Eisenhower's 1952 landslide?

CBS borrowed a UNIVAC built for the Atomic Energy Commission, and on election night it called the landslide from a small sample of the vote.

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

Gillian Jacobs, then starring in the sitcom Community, directed The Queen of Code; it was pitched to viewers with the line 'You probably don't know the name Grace Hopper, but you should.'

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.

Howard Bromberg of the COBOL committee once shipped the Pentagon which object, engraved with the word COBOL?

A tombstone, in granite: Hopper loved telling how it went express collect to Charles Phillips, the project's sponsor, and how, by her account, the prank got the language's backers moving.

Which computing pioneer was honoured alongside Hopper at a 2016 White House ceremony?

Margaret Hamilton led the team that wrote the on-board flight software for the Apollo command and lunar modules; her award that day came beside Hopper's posthumous one.

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

Navy Programming Languages Group was her command after the 1967 recall; its job was to put the whole Navy on one standard COBOL, with test programs that checked each compiler against it.

In the 1970s, what did Hopper urge the Defense Department to adopt for its computing?

Networks of small distributed computers were her prescription, with any user at any node able to reach shared databases; she wanted more systems of computers, she said, not bigger ones.

Hopper's 1967 recall to active duty was planned to last six months: about how long did it run?

19 years: the six-month job of standardising the Navy's COBOL kept being extended, and she finally retired in August 1986.

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

Rear admiral, lower half, to give the rank its full name: she was promoted to commodore in 1983, and the Navy renamed that one-star grade in 1985.

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 gave her its Golden Gavel in 1988; by then her irreverent, joke-filled lectures had made her one of computing's most sought-after speakers.

Which Irish poet, long a Stanford professor, dedicated the poem 'Code' to Hopper in 2001?

Eavan Boland's 'Code' is an ode to Hopper as 'maker of a computer compiler': the poet pictures her at her desk writing code and reaches for her across distance and generations.

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

NSA released the lecture, 'Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People', which the then-Captain Hopper had given to agency staff in August 1982.

In 1964 Hopper received the Achievement Award, the highest honour of which society?

Society of Women Engineers cited her as an engineering manager and as the originator of systems that let a computer write its own programs.

Who was the first winner, in 1971, of the ACM award for young computer professionals named after Hopper?

Donald Knuth won the first award in 1971; it honours work done before the age of 35, though Hopper herself was 37 when she first met a computer.

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 woman from the Navy's ranks; which nurse did the first honour?

Lenah Higbee led the Navy Nurse Corps through the First World War and became the first living woman to receive the Navy Cross; three of her nurses, killed by the 1918 flu, got it posthumously.

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

Iran's Revolutionary Guard boats came within about 200 yards of Hopper and two other US warships; a radio voice warned 'You will explode after a few minutes', and the boats dropped white boxes in the water and left.

What kind of object is 5773 Hopper, discovered in 1989 and later named in her honour?

An asteroid in the main belt: Eleanor Helin spotted it from Palomar in July 1989, and the naming citation honouring Hopper followed three decades later, in 2019.

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 data-journalism site produced the 2015 Hopper documentary The Queen of Code?

FiveThirtyEight released it in its Signals series, introducing Hopper as the woman behind COBOL, which by its count ran 70 percent of all actively used code by 2000.

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

Cyber Sea completes the title of the Naval Institute Press biography; its author had already written Hopper into Improbable Warriors, a study of four women scientists in the wartime Navy.

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.