GA2-240202501-AA1-EV03. Chronicle

 Chronicle of Grace Murray Hopper

Grace Murray Hopper was born on December 9, 1906, in New York City into a family with a military tradition.

In 1928, she graduated in mathematics and physics from Vassar College, at that time a private, all-women's college. In 1930, Grace Murray Hopper received a master's in mathematics from Yale University. In 1934, she received a Doctor of Mathematics at Yale.

During World War II, she enlisted in the armed forces and was sent to Harvard to finish her studies in engineering and applied physics in the computer laboratory. In 1944 she began working with Aiken on Harvard's Mark I computer, becoming the third person to program it. At the end of the war, Hopper was working on the Harvard Mark II computer.  

In 1949, she joined the Eckert-Mauhly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician to work on the UNIVAC electromechanical computer. She was the creator of the first computer compiler in 1952, as this revolutionary software enabled the first automatic programming of a computer language.

In 1959, she invented COBOL, the first common programming language dedicated to management. He then worked on the international standardization of programming languages and worked hard on validation procedures.

In 1967 she was called back to active duty to standardize the Navy's high-level languages. In 1973, already in the reserves, she was the first woman to attain the rank of captain. She retired permanently in 1986 as a rear admiral, the oldest person to retire from the U.S. Navy.

Throughout her lengthy career, she received numerous awards and more than 40 honorary titles. The most important was the Man of the Year award by the Data Processing Management Association in 1969. She was the first woman to be elected Distinguished Fellow by the British Computer Society in 1973, the first American to receive this honor.

In 1992, she died at the age of 85 in Arlington, Virginia. She was buried with military honors.