Grace Hope

Grace Brewster Hopper (English: Grace Brewster Hopper, surname: Murray; December 9, 1906 - January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and U.S. Navy commodore. She was a pioneer in computer programming and the first person to propose the theory of machine-independent programming languages. She used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language that is still in use today. She was also one of the earliest programmers of the Harvard Type I computer and is credited with being the author of the first computer manual, A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Before joining the Navy, Hope earned a PhD in mathematics and mathematical physics from Yale University and served as a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. During World War II, she left her position at Vassar College to join the United States Naval Reserve. Hopper began his computer career in 1944 as a member of Harvard's Type I team, led by Howard Aiken. In 1949, she joined the Eckert-Mauchley Computer Company and participated in the development of the UNIVAC I computer. At Eckert-Mauchlay, she oversaw the development of one of the earliest COBOL compilers. She firmly believed that programming should be simplified using English-based computer programming languages. Her compiler converts English words into machine code that computers can understand. By 1952, Hope had completed her program linker (originally called a compiler), written for the A-0 system. In 1954, Eckert-Mauchley selected Hope to lead its automatic programming department, and she led the release of some of the earliest compiled languages, including FLOW-MATIC. In 1959, she participated in the CODASYL Association and helped create COBOL, a machine-independent programming language based on English vocabulary. Hope continued to promote the use of the language throughout the 1960s. The U.S. Navy's Arleigh Burke-class missile destroyer USS Hopper is named after her, as are the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the NVIDIA GPU architecture "Hopper Microarchitecture". in her