Grace Hopper

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, affectionately known as 'Amazing Grace', was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral who revolutionized software engineering. After earning her doctorate in mathematics from Yale University in 1934, Hopper joined the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II, assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University to program the electromechanical Harvard Mark I computer.

In 1952, working at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation on the UNIVAC I, Hopper invented the world's first compiler (the A-0 System), which translated human-readable mathematical code into binary machine instructions. When critics told her that computers could only do arithmetic, Hopper retorted: 'It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.' Her visionary philosophy—that programming languages should be written in plain English rather than machine code—led directly to the creation of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), which processed trillions of dollars in global commerce. She also popularized the term 'computer bug' after removing a live moth trapped in a Mark II relay. She retired as the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy at age seventy-nine.