Grace Murray Hopper

Honored by Frances Hunt

She was a pioneer in the field of computer science and served many years in the United States Navy.

6/3/94

Honored by the Computer Science Department

Admiral U.S. Navy Grace Murray Hopper was a pioneer in the field of programming languages. She was an important contributor to the programming technology for the Harvard Mark I and UNIVAC I computers. As an early protagonist for the use of high-level programming languages, she was a leader in the development of compilers for the COBOL language - thereby paving the way for the integration of computers into the business world. As a member of a technical team that discovered a "dead moth" inside of a computer as the cause of a malfunction, some have credited her with coining the use of the word "bug" to describe an error in the logic of a computer program and hence the phrase "debugging a program" (although the word had reportedly been in use earlier in describing technological malfunctions). An Admiral in the U.S. Navy, Grace Hopper's expertise was of such importance that she was called out of retirement to work on computing problems for the Navy. Both before and throughout her retirement, she was highly sought-after as a lecturer and after-dinner speaker.

7/1/96