Grace Hopper Trivia
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92 free Grace Hopper trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Grace Hopper trivia quiz covers the mathematician who taught computers to understand English and served in the US Navy into her eightieth year. The easy questions are the ones every programmer half-remembers: the language she is called the grandmother of, the moth taped into a logbook, the rank she reached and the honour President Obama gave her posthumously. From there it moves into her life story, from dismantling seven alarm clocks as a child to her Yale doctorate, her wartime commission and her work on the Harvard Mark I. The harder end is for computing historians and pub-quiz specialists: the weight exemption she needed to enlist, the first computer manual, the A-0 system nobody would touch, FLOW-MATIC's original name, the CODASYL conference, the 60 Minutes segment that got her promoted by Reagan, the ship where she retired, the pepper packets she called picoseconds, the destroyer and GPU architecture that carry her name and the backward-running clock on her wall. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Hopper, her machines and her languages before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace and history of computing quizzes next.
30 of 92 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where was Grace Hopper born in 1906?
New York
New York City was home, and mathematics ran in the family: her mother loved the subject and passed that love on to Grace.
Q 02What was Grace Hopper's maiden name?
Murray
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.
Q 03How did Hopper's mother respond when Grace dismantled the alarm clocks?
Allowed her just one
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.
Q 04Why did Hopper keep a clock on her wall that ran counterclockwise?
To fight people's allergy to change
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.
Q 05Why was Hopper initially rejected for early admission to college at 16?
Her Latin scores were too low
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.
Q 06From which university did Hopper earn her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1934?
Yale
Yale awarded her the mathematics doctorate in 1934, and in 2017 renamed one of its residential colleges in her honour.
Q 07At which college did Hopper teach mathematics before joining the Navy?
Vassar
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.
Q 08Which women's Navy Reserve organisation did Hopper join in 1943?
WAVES
WAVES, short for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, swore her in during December 1943, after the Navy had at first turned her away.
Q 09As of 2025, the warship USS Hopper has its home port at which naval base?
Pearl Harbor
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.
Q 10On Howard Aiken's orders, Hopper wrote the first what for Harvard's Mark I computer?
Computer manual
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.
Q 11What was IBM's official name for the Harvard Mark I that Hopper programmed?
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator
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.
Q 12Hopper's Mark I team ran bomb calculations in 1944 for which Manhattan Project scientist?
John von Neumann
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?
Q 13According to Hopper's famous maxim, what is easier than getting permission?
Asking forgiveness
Q 21What was FLOW-MATIC originally called?
B-0
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.
Q 22What does the acronym COBOL stand for?
Common Business-Oriented Language
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.
Q 23Which consortium, born of a 1959 Pentagon meeting, oversaw the creation of COBOL?
CODASYL
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.
Q 14Which company did Hopper join in 1949 to work on the UNIVAC I?
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation
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.
Q 15What distinction does the UNIVAC I hold among American computers?
First designed for business use
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.
Q 16Which US government body was the first customer for the UNIVAC I in 1951?
The Census Bureau
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.
Q 17What objection met Hopper's proposal for a programming language written in ordinary words?
That computers didn't understand English
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.
Q 18What was the name of the compiler Hopper had running on the UNIVAC I in 1952?
A-0
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.
Q 19What did sceptics tell Hopper computers could only do when she showed them a working compiler?
Arithmetic
Arithmetic, they told her, was all a computer could do; 'I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it,' she recalled of 1952.
Q 20What title did Remington Rand's UNIVAC division give Hopper in the 1950s?
First director of automatic programming
First director of automatic programming was her title; the department she ran released early compiled languages, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC among them.
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.
Q 24Which IBM business language lent ideas to COBOL alongside Hopper's FLOW-MATIC?
COMTRAN
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.
Q 25What nickname did Hopper earn for her part in the birth of COBOL?
Grandma COBOL
Grandma COBOL stuck because the language leaned so heavily on her FLOW-MATIC; the trade press has also called her its mother.
Q 26What did Hopper's associates find stuck in a relay of the Mark II computer in 1947?
A moth
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.
Q 27Which museum holds the remains of the famous 1947 computer bug?
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
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.
Q 28How long were the 'nanosecond' wires Hopper handed out to show how far light travels in that time?
About 1 foot
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.
Q 29What did Hopper hand out to represent picoseconds in her later lectures?
Packets of pepper
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.
Q 30Hopper's nanosecond wires answered admirals who kept asking her what?
Why satellite communication took so long
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.