Grace Hopper Biography

Grace Hopper

Dr. Grace Murray Hopper was one of the earliest computer programmers and a leader in the field of software development concepts. In 1928 she graduated from Vassar College with a BA in mathematics and physics. While an instructor at Vassar, she earned an MA in 1930 and a PhD in 1934 at Yale, one of four women in a doctoral program of ten students, In 1930, she married Vincent Foster Hopper. (He died in 1945 during World War II, and they had no children.) She joined the United States Naval Reserve in 1943 and was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she worked at Harvard's Cruft Laboratories on the Mark series of computers. In 1949 she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, subsequently the Sperry Corporation, as a senior mathematician, while still a consultant and lecturer for the United States Naval Reserve. After retirement from the Navy in 1986, she became a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, and continued working well into her eighties.