100 free Grace Hopper trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Grace Hopper trivia quiz covers the mathematician who taught computers to understand English and served in the US Navy into her eightieth year. The easy questions are the ones every programmer half-remembers: the language she is called the grandmother of, the moth taped into a logbook, the rank she reached and the honour President Obama gave her posthumously. From there it moves into her life story, from dismantling seven alarm clocks as a child to her Yale doctorate, her wartime commission and her work on the Harvard Mark I. The harder end is for computing historians and pub-quiz specialists: the weight exemption she needed to enlist, the first computer manual, the A-0 system nobody would touch, FLOW-MATIC's original name, the CODASYL conference, the 60 Minutes segment that got her promoted by Reagan, the ship where she retired, the pepper packets she called picoseconds, the destroyer and GPU architecture that carry her name and the backward-running clock on her wall. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Hopper, her machines and her languages before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace and history of computing quizzes next.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where was Grace Hopper born in 1906?
New York
Her great-grandfather was a Navy admiral who fought at the Battle of Mobile Bay in the Civil War.
Q 02What was Grace Hopper's maiden name?
Murray
She married NYU professor Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930, divorced in 1945 and kept his surname.
Q 03How many alarm clocks did the young Grace dismantle at age 7 before her mother caught on?
Seven
She was then limited to one clock, and later kept a clock that ran backwards on her wall.
Q 04Why did Hopper keep a clock on her wall that ran counterclockwise?
To fight people's allergy to change
She said humans love to say we've always done it this way, and she tried to fight that.
Q 05Why was Hopper initially rejected for early admission to college at 16?
Her Latin scores were too low
She was admitted the next year and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics and physics in 1928.
Q 06From which university did Hopper earn her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1934?
Yale
Her dissertation, New Types of Irreducibility Criteria, was supervised by Oystein Ore.
Q 07At which college was Hopper a professor of mathematics before joining the Navy?
Vassar
She started teaching there in 1931 and was promoted to associate professor in 1941.
Q 08Which women's Navy Reserve organisation did Hopper join in 1943?
WAVES
She had earlier been turned down as too old at 34 and too light for her height.
Q 09How far below the Navy's 120-pound minimum was Hopper when she needed an exemption to be commissioned?
15 lb
She trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College and graduated first in her class.
Q 10Which early electromechanical computer did Hopper program from 1944?
The Mark I
The team was led by Howard H. Aiken, and she co-authored three papers on the machine with him.
Q 11What was the alternative name of the electromechanical computer Hopper programmed at Harvard?
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator
Hopper is credited with writing the first computer manual, A Manual of Operation for the machine.
Q 12Which Manhattan Project scientist initiated one of the first programs run on the Mark I in March 1944?
John von Neumann
He needed to know whether implosion was a viable way to detonate the atomic bomb.
Q 13Why was Hopper's request to transfer to the regular Navy denied at the end of World War II?
She was two years over the age cutoff
Q 21What was FLOW-MATIC originally called?
B-0
It was the first English-like data processing language, developed for the UNIVAC I from 1955 to 1959.
Q 22What does the acronym COBOL stand for?
Common Business-Oriented Language
It was designed for business, finance and administrative systems and is still used on mainframes.
Q 23At which two-day conference in spring 1959 was COBOL defined?
CODASYL
Hopper served as a technical consultant, and many of her former employees sat on the committee.
The cutoff was 38; she stayed in the Navy Reserve instead.
Q 14Which company did Hopper join in 1949 to work on the UNIVAC I?
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation
It was later taken over by Remington Rand, for whom she did her original compiler work.
Q 15What distinction does the UNIVAC I hold in computing history?
The first US general-purpose electronic computer for business
CBS used one to predict Eisenhower's 1952 landslide from a 5.5% sample of the vote.
Q 16Which US body accepted the first UNIVAC on 31 March 1951?
The Census Bureau
The fifth machine, built for the Atomic Energy Commission, was the one CBS used on election night 1952.
Q 17What objection did Hopper meet when she first proposed a programming language built from ordinary words?
That computers didn't understand English
She persisted; her idea was not accepted for three years.
Q 18What was the name of the first version of Hopper's compiler, operational in 1952?
A-0
It was really a link-loader, and she said she had a running compiler and nobody would touch it.
Q 19What did colleagues insist computers could only do, when they dismissed Hopper's compiler?
Arithmetic
She recalled that nobody believed she had a running compiler.
Q 20What title was Hopper given at her company in 1954?
First director of automatic programming
Her department went on to release MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC.
Q 24Which IBM language contributed ideas to COBOL alongside Hopper's FLOW-MATIC?
COMTRAN
Mount Holyoke alumna Jean E. Sammet was among the committee members.
Q 25What nickname did Hopper earn for her association with the business language?
Grandma COBOL
She was in demand as a speaker known for a lively, irreverent style and early war stories.
Q 26What example did Hopper give of a plain-English COBOL statement?
Subtract income tax from pay
She contrasted it with writing the same thing in octal code or symbols.
Q 27What did Hopper's associates find stuck in a relay of the Mark II computer in 1947?
A moth
It was taped into the logbook with the note First actual case of bug being found, and now sits in the Smithsonian.
Q 28Which museum holds the remains of the famous 1947 computer bug?
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
The term bug for a malfunction had been used in other fields for decades before computing.
Q 29How long were the pieces of wire Hopper handed out to represent a nanosecond?
About 11.8 inches
That is the distance light travels in a vacuum in a nanosecond; a 984-foot coil stood for a microsecond.
Q 30What did Hopper hand out to represent picoseconds in her later lectures?
Packets of pepper
She used the wire nanoseconds to explain why computers had to be small to be fast.