Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper combined mathematics, naval service, programming, and unusually effective technical communication. Working with the Harvard Mark I team during the Second World War, she prepared calculations and documentation for an electromechanical computer. At Eckert-Mauchly and Remington Rand, she advocated tools that allowed programmers to use more familiar symbolic instructions instead of writing every operation at machine level.

Hopper’s compiler work and the FLOW-MATIC language influenced the development of COBOL, a language designed for business data processing. She did not single-handedly invent compilers or COBOL, but she was a central advocate and organizer in the teams that made higher-level programming practical. Her naval career continued for decades, and her lectures used concrete demonstrations, including lengths of wire representing nanoseconds, to make computing performance understandable to broad audiences.