Born on December 9 of 1906.
Grace Hopper was a strong woman, strong
because she was in disadvantage of being a woman (I mean disadvantage because
of the time she was living) an interested in technology. She went to Vassar
College to study maths, physics and engineering. She made a thesis called “A
new Criterion for Reducibility of Algebraic Equations” .
She worked first as an instructor, then as
an assistant professor and finally as an associate professor at Vassar. During
the second World War, she joined the US naval reserve.
After the war, her next important move was
the Eckert-Mauchly Corporation which was nearing completion of the UNIVAC. She
was thinking in making machines easier to use by creating higher level
languages. So in 1952 she and her team at Remington wrote the A-0 compiler. She
solved the problem of forward references by using a fixed jump area where the
addresses of routines could be stored when they were discovered later in the
program's text.
She also wrote the first symbolic differentiator.
She demonstrated that a compiler could translate programs written in French and
German into machine code. She deserves to be called the mother of Cobol since
she did much to influence the newer details of Cobol Language.
She retired in 1966 with the rank of
commander but the Navy still needed her and seven months later she was asked to
take on the job of standardizing the Navy's use of languages. She returned to
active duty at 60 and was promoted to Captain.
In 19569 she was selected by the Data
Processing Management Association as their first “man” of the year. She proved
that women can be better programmers than men. In 1964 she awarded the Society
of women Engineers Achievement Award and was made a Distinguished Felow of the
British Computer Society in 1973, the first woman and the first American ever
to be so honored.
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