Grace Hopper, PhD, was a pioneering computer scientist and U.S. Navy rear admiral whose work transformed the field of computing. She earned a PhD in mathematics from Yale University in 1934 and joined the Navy during World War II. There she joined a team working on the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, better known as the MARK I, one of the earliest electromechanical computers. In 1949, while working on the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC I and II), Hopper pioneered the idea of automatic programming. She developed the first compiler to translate written instructions into machine code and helped create COBOL, a programming language that made computers more widely accessible to people without an engineering or math background. Her career spanned more than four decades, during which she received numerous honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2016. She earned the nickname“Amazing Grace” for her trailblazing career.
