100 Fun Facts About Grace Hopper

Where was Grace Hopper born in 1906?

Her great-grandfather was a Navy admiral who fought at the Battle of Mobile Bay in the Civil War.

What was Grace Hopper's maiden name?

She married NYU professor Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930, divorced in 1945 and kept his surname.

How many alarm clocks did the young Grace dismantle at age 7 before her mother caught on?

She was then limited to one clock, and later kept a clock that ran backwards on her wall.

Why did Hopper keep a clock on her wall that ran counterclockwise?

She said humans love to say we've always done it this way, and she tried to fight that.

Why was Hopper initially rejected for early admission to college at 16?

She was admitted the next year and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics and physics in 1928.

From which university did Hopper earn her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1934?

Her dissertation, New Types of Irreducibility Criteria, was supervised by Oystein Ore.

At which college was Hopper a professor of mathematics before joining the Navy?

She started teaching there in 1931 and was promoted to associate professor in 1941.

Which women's Navy Reserve organisation did Hopper join in 1943?

She had earlier been turned down as too old at 34 and too light for her height.

How far below the Navy's 120-pound minimum was Hopper when she needed an exemption to be commissioned?

She trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College and graduated first in her class.

Which early electromechanical computer did Hopper program from 1944?

The team was led by Howard H. Aiken, and she co-authored three papers on the machine with him.

What was the alternative name of the electromechanical computer Hopper programmed at Harvard?

Hopper is credited with writing the first computer manual, A Manual of Operation for the machine.

Which Manhattan Project scientist initiated one of the first programs run on the Mark I in March 1944?

He needed to know whether implosion was a viable way to detonate the atomic bomb.

Why was Hopper's request to transfer to the regular Navy denied at the end of World War II?

The cutoff was 38; she stayed in the Navy Reserve instead.

Which company did Hopper join in 1949 to work on the UNIVAC I?

It was later taken over by Remington Rand, for whom she did her original compiler work.

What distinction does the UNIVAC I hold in computing history?

CBS used one to predict Eisenhower's 1952 landslide from a 5.5% sample of the vote.

Which US body accepted the first UNIVAC on 31 March 1951?

The fifth machine, built for the Atomic Energy Commission, was the one CBS used on election night 1952.

What objection did Hopper meet when she first proposed a programming language built from ordinary words?

She persisted; her idea was not accepted for three years.

What was the name of the first version of Hopper's compiler, operational in 1952?

It was really a link-loader, and she said she had a running compiler and nobody would touch it.

What did colleagues insist computers could only do, when they dismissed Hopper's compiler?

She recalled that nobody believed she had a running compiler.

What title was Hopper given at her company in 1954?

Her department went on to release MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC.

What was FLOW-MATIC originally called?

It was the first English-like data processing language, developed for the UNIVAC I from 1955 to 1959.

What does the acronym COBOL stand for?

It was designed for business, finance and administrative systems and is still used on mainframes.

At which two-day conference in spring 1959 was COBOL defined?

Hopper served as a technical consultant, and many of her former employees sat on the committee.

Which IBM language contributed ideas to COBOL alongside Hopper's FLOW-MATIC?

Mount Holyoke alumna Jean E. Sammet was among the committee members.

What nickname did Hopper earn for her association with the business language?

She was in demand as a speaker known for a lively, irreverent style and early war stories.

What example did Hopper give of a plain-English COBOL statement?

She contrasted it with writing the same thing in octal code or symbols.

What did Hopper's associates find stuck in a relay of the Mark II computer in 1947?

It was taped into the logbook with the note First actual case of bug being found, and now sits in the Smithsonian.

Which museum holds the remains of the famous 1947 computer bug?

The term bug for a malfunction had been used in other fields for decades before computing.

How long were the pieces of wire Hopper handed out to represent a nanosecond?

That is the distance light travels in a vacuum in a nanosecond; a 984-foot coil stood for a microsecond.

What did Hopper hand out to represent picoseconds in her later lectures?

She used the wire nanoseconds to explain why computers had to be small to be fast.

What question from generals and admirals prompted Hopper's nanosecond visual aid?

She was careful to explain that signals travel more slowly through real wire than through a vacuum.

At what rank did Hopper first retire from the Naval Reserve at the end of 1966?

She was recalled to active duty in August 1967 for what became an indefinite assignment.

Which admiral promoted Hopper to captain in 1973?

She had been asked to return to active duty again in 1972.

Which TV programme's 1983 segment on Hopper prompted a congressman to push for her promotion?

Republican Philip Crane championed a resolution to promote her to commodore.

Which president promoted Hopper to commodore in December 1983?

The rank of commodore was renamed rear admiral (lower half) in 1985.

How old was Hopper when she finally retired from the Navy in August 1986?

She was the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the US Navy at the time.

Aboard which ship was Hopper's retirement ceremony held in Boston?

It was the oldest commissioned ship in the Navy, at 188 years, and she was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal there.

Which company hired Hopper as a senior consultant after she left the Navy?

She jokingly proposed being exhibited in their computing museum on alternating Thursdays for a generous salary.

What did Hopper always wear to her post-retirement lectures, contrary to Defense Department policy?

She generally received a standing ovation at Digital's engineering facilities.

What did Hopper say was her most important accomplishment other than building the compiler?

She said she backed them up and stirred them up at intervals so they didn't forget to take chances.

Where is Grace Hopper buried?

She died in her sleep on New Year's Day 1992 at her home in Arlington County, Virginia, aged 85.

Which honour did President Obama award Hopper posthumously in November 2016?

She had received the National Medal of Technology in 1991.

How many honorary degrees was Hopper awarded during her lifetime?

A residential college at Yale was renamed for her in 2017.

What type of Navy warship is the USS Hopper, named for her?

Nicknamed Amazing Grace, it was launched in 1996 and commissioned in San Francisco in 1997.

Which chip company named its GPU architecture Hopper and CPU generation Grace after her?

The Cray XE6 supercomputer at NERSC was also named Hopper.

What did Google name after Hopper in 2020?

The 3,900-mile cable connecting the US, UK and Spain was completed in 2021.

In which video game can players recruit Grace Hopper as a Great Admiral?

Her official portrait is also sample data in the matplotlib Python library, replacing the Lenna image.

Which professional body did Hopper help found in May 1950?

It gave her its highest honour, the Achievement Award, in 1964.

What did the 2013 Google Doodle for Hopper's 107th birthday show her doing?

At the end of the animation, a familiar insect flies out of the computer.

Which annual conference for women in computing was inspired by her legacy?

It brings the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.

For what year did Time magazine choose Hopper as its retroactive Woman of the Year in 2019?

The magazine created 89 new covers celebrating women of the year back to 1920.

Hopper Hall, the first service-academy building named for a woman, houses which department?

The Academy also owns a Cray XC-30 supercomputer named Grace.

Grace Hopper's great-grandfather, an admiral, fought in which Civil War engagement?

Alexander Wilson Russell's naval career foreshadowed his great-granddaughter's own path to rear admiral.

Grace Murray married Vincent Foster Hopper, a professor at which institution, in 1930?

They divorced in 1945; she never remarried but kept his surname for the rest of her life.

Where did Hopper attend the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School, graduating first in her class?

She was then assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard under Howard H. Aiken.

In 1969 Hopper received the inaugural 'Man of the Year' award from which organisation?

The prize is now called the Distinguished Information Sciences Award.

In 1973 Hopper became the first American made a Distinguished Fellow of which body?

She was also the first woman of any nationality to receive that fellowship.

Which honour did Hopper receive in 1991, the year before her death?

The citation praised her programming languages for opening 'a significantly larger universe of users'.

Which university named one of its residential colleges after Grace Hopper?

She earned her mathematics Ph.D. there in 1934; the college was renamed for her in 2017.

How old was Grace Hopper when she died at her Arlington, Virginia home on New Year's Day 1992?

She died in her sleep of natural causes and was buried with full military honours at Arlington National Cemetery.

In which New Jersey town did Hopper attend the Hartridge School?

The girls' school later merged with the neighbouring Wardlaw School, which still lists her among its class of 1924 alumni.

Hopper was the eldest of how many children?

Her parents, Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne, attended West End Collegiate Church.

Hopper's parents were of Scottish descent and which other?

Her mother's maiden name, Van Horne, carried the family's Dutch line.

Besides age and weight, why else was Hopper first refused a Navy commission?

She got round it in 1943 by taking a leave of absence from her college post and volunteering for the Navy Reserve.

At what rank was Hopper assigned to Harvard's Bureau of Ships Computation Project in 1944?

She would climb all the way to rear admiral over the next four decades, mostly as a reservist.

What did Hopper turn down in order to stay at Harvard's Computation Lab until 1949?

She stayed on as a research fellow under a Navy contract, then left for the commercial computer world.

Who was a fellow first programmer of the Mark I with Hopper and Robert Campbell?

The small team that physically operated the machine was never told the overall purpose of its wartime work.

Hopper put the cost of the Mark I's designer enclosure, which annoyed Aiken, at what?

Industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes styled the casing at IBM's expense; Aiken wanted the money spent on more computing hardware.

On what date in 1947 was the 'first actual case of bug being found' logged?

The Mark II was being debugged that month, with delivery to the Navy following in March 1948.

Which computer pioneer built and programmed the Mark II alongside Hopper under Aiken?

The Mark II swapped the Mark I's counters for fast relays and was built as two sub-computers that could cross-check each other.

The Mark II was delivered in 1948 to the Navy's proving ground in which place?

It weighed 25 tons, filled over 4,000 square feet and was used for ballistic calculations.

Which wartime computer had the founders of Hopper's 1949 employer built at Penn?

They quit the university over a policy that would have made them sign away their patent rights.

Hopper's employer Remington Rand merged into Sperry Rand, which survives today as what?

The firm lost its government contracts during the McCarthy era after being accused of hiring engineers with 'Communistic leanings'.

What job title did Hopper hold when she joined the UNIVAC team in 1949?

The machine she helped build became the first large-scale electronic computer on the market in 1951.

Under what marketing name was Hopper's A-3 compiler released?

The A series ran A-1 through A-3 before the algebraic AT-3 and then the English-like business language followed.

When did Hopper first pitch English-keyword data processing to Rand management?

Management called the idea unfeasible; by early 1955 her team had written a specification and a prototype anyway.

How were data structures defined in FLOW-MATIC, unlike its English-like statements?

It was the first system to cleanly separate the description of data from the operations on it, an idea COBOL kept.

Which COBOL figurative constant was written in FLOW-MATIC as a string of Z's?

The number of Z's told the compiler how many digits of precision you wanted.

Who called the April 1959 Penn meeting on common business languages that Hopper attended?

The Burroughs computer scientist's meeting led to the consortium that wrote COBOL within the year.

What share of COBOL 60 did Hopper claim in 1980 was really FLOW-MATIC?

She admitted crediting IBM's rival language too, but only to 'keep other people happy'.

Hopper led which body in the Office of Information Systems Planning from 1967 to 1977?

There she wrote validation software to force every Navy COBOL compiler onto one standard.

Which agency took over Hopper's language-conformance tests in the 1980s?

The Navy's tests had already pushed the major vendors' dialects of FORTRAN and COBOL to converge.

In the 1970s Hopper urged the Defense Department to swap big centralized systems for what?

Her vision had any user on any node reaching shared databases over the network, years before that was normal.

Hopper's August 1967 recall to active duty was originally meant to last how long?

The short stint became open-ended, and she was still in uniform nearly two decades later.

Hopper's naval career spanned more than how many years by her 1986 retirement?

Congress gave special approval for her to keep serving years past mandatory retirement.

Jay Elliot said inside the 'all Navy' Hopper was what, 'dying to be released'?

The Navy's own profile of her is titled 'Navy to the Core, a Pirate at Heart'.

Which organisation gave Hopper its Golden Gavel Award in 1988?

Fitting for a speaker famous for an irreverent style and a deep stock of war stories.

Which Irish poet dedicated the poem 'Code' to Hopper in 2001?

It appeared in the collection Against Love Poetry.

Which agency released a 1982 Hopper lecture in two parts in August 2024?

The 90-minute talk had sat in the agency's archives for more than four decades.

Women at which company formed an employee group called 'Hoppers'?

The group also set up a scholarship in her name.

Who was the first winner of the ACM's Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1971?

The prize goes for a single significant contribution made before the age of 35 and now carries $35,000.

What is the motto of the destroyer USS Hopper?

The Latin translates as Dare and Do; the ship's shield shows a gold lion with red talons on blue.

At which shipyard was USS Hopper built?

Construction began in February 1995 and she was christened on 6 January 1996, the 20th destroyer of her class.

USS Hopper was the second US warship named for a Navy woman; the first honoured whom?

The destroyer USS Higbee (DD-806) carried that honour first.

In January 2008 USS Hopper faced threatening gunboats from which country near Hormuz?

The boats came within 200 yards, radioed 'You will explode after a few minutes', then dropped white boxes in the water and left.

The H100 GPU on the architecture named for Hopper packs roughly how many transistors?

Demand during the AI boom was so fierce that Larry Ellison described 'an hour of sushi and begging' for them with Elon Musk.

The residential college renamed for Hopper in 2017 had honoured which US vice-president?

The college's new arms carry a heraldic dolphin for her Navy career and rectangles and circles for her maths and computing.

Which outlet produced the 2015 Hopper documentary The Queen of Code?

Her life had by then also filled full-length biographies by Kurt Beyer and Kathleen Broome Williams.

Kathleen Broome Williams's 2004 biography calls Hopper 'Admiral of the' what?

Williams also profiled her alongside three other Navy women scientists in Improbable Warriors.

What was the title of Hopper's landmark May 1952 paper on compilers?

She presented it at the ACM conference in Pittsburgh, the same year her first compiler ran.