Grace Hopper Trivia
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98 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.
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Q 01Where was Grace Hopper born in 1906?
New York
Grace Hopper was born in New York City on 9 December 1906; her father Walter was an insurance broker, and the family spent summers at a house in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire.
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
Seven alarm clocks were taken apart by the seven-year-old Grace, who wanted to see how they worked, before her mother noticed and limited her to dismantling just one.
Q 04Why did Hopper keep a clock on her wall that ran counterclockwise?
To fight people's allergy to change
To fight people's allergy to change, she said: humans love to say 'we've always done it this way', so she kept a clock that ran counterclockwise as a daily reminder.
Q 05Why was Hopper initially rejected for early admission to college at 16?
Her Latin scores were too low
Her Latin scores were too low on the entrance exam, so she was turned away at 16; admitted a year later, she 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
Vassar hired her as a mathematics instructor in 1931 while she finished her doctorate, and promoted her to associate professor in 1941, two years before she left for the Navy.
Q 08Which women's Navy Reserve organisation did Hopper join in 1943?
WAVES
WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) took her in December 1943 on a leave of absence from teaching, after she had first been rejected as too old at 34 and underweight.
Q 09How far below the Navy's 120-pound minimum was Hopper when she needed an exemption to be commissioned?
15 lb
15 lb under the 120-pound minimum, at 105 pounds, she needed a waiver to be sworn in; she then graduated first in her midshipmen's class in 1944.
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
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was IBM's official name for the Harvard machine; Hopper wrote its user manual, A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, published in 1946.
Q 12Which Manhattan Project scientist initiated one of the first programs run on the Mark I in March 1944?
John von Neumann
John von Neumann, then working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, ran implosion calculations on the Harvard machine from 29 March 1944 to test whether implosion could detonate the bomb.
Q 13According to Hopper's famous maxim, what is easier than getting permission?
Q 21What was FLOW-MATIC originally called?
B-0
B-0 (Business Language version 0) was the original name of FLOW-MATIC, the first English-like data processing language, developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand from 1955 onward.
Q 22What does the acronym COBOL stand for?
Common Business-Oriented Language
Common Business-Oriented Language is the expansion; COBOL was designed for business, finance and administrative data processing, with English-like verbs such as ADD and MOVE meant to be readable by non-programmers.
Q 23At which two-day conference in spring 1959 was COBOL defined?
CODASYL
Asking forgiveness
Asking forgiveness is the answer: in a 1986 interview with the Navy magazine Chips Ahoy she said 'It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission', a line innovators still quote.
Q 14Which company did Hopper join in 1949 to work on the UNIVAC I?
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, set up by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in Philadelphia, hired her in 1949; Remington Rand bought the firm in 1950, and she did her compiler work under that owner.
Q 15What distinction does the UNIVAC I hold in computing history?
The first US general-purpose electronic computer for business
The first US general-purpose electronic computer for business, the UNIVAC I used UNISERVO metal-tape drives, the first commercial magnetic tape units, and 46 machines were built in all.
Q 16Which US body accepted the first UNIVAC on 31 March 1951?
The Census Bureau
The Census Bureau accepted the first UNIVAC on 31 March 1951, though the machine stayed at the factory for a time; the fifth unit, built for the Atomic Energy Commission, was CBS's election-night computer in 1952.
Q 17What objection did Hopper meet when she first proposed a programming language built from ordinary words?
That computers didn't understand English
That computers didn't understand English was the reply, she recalled, when she first pitched keyword programming; she persisted, and her FLOW-MATIC compiler later proved the idea on the UNIVAC.
Q 18What was the name of the first version of Hopper's compiler, operational in 1952?
A-0
A-0 ran on the UNIVAC I in 1952; it worked more like a loader or linker than a modern compiler, and she complained that nobody would touch her running compiler.
Q 19What did colleagues insist computers could only do, when they dismissed Hopper's compiler?
Arithmetic
Arithmetic was all computers could do, they told her; she said she had a running compiler and nobody would touch it because a machine could not possibly write programs.
Q 20What title was Hopper given at her company in 1954?
First director of automatic programming
First director of automatic programming was her title from 1954 at Remington Rand's UNIVAC division, where her department produced the MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC compilers.
CODASYL, the Conference on Data Systems Languages, brought industry and government computer experts together; Hopper was its technical consultant and several of her former staff sat on the short-term committee that wrote COBOL.
Q 24Which IBM language contributed ideas to COBOL alongside Hopper's FLOW-MATIC?
COMTRAN
COMTRAN, IBM's Commercial Translator designed by Bob Bemer, supplied ideas such as the PICTURE clause to COBOL, which otherwise drew mainly on FLOW-MATIC.
Q 25What nickname did Hopper earn for her association with the business language?
Grandma COBOL
Grandma COBOL was the nickname, because the business language drew heavily on her FLOW-MATIC; she was also called 'Amazing Grace', and her lively, irreverent talks made her a sought-after speaker.
Q 26What example did Hopper give of a plain-English COBOL statement?
Subtract income tax from pay
'Subtract income tax from pay' was her example: she said she could write that in plain English instead of trying to express it in octal code or a string of symbols.
Q 27What did Hopper's associates find stuck in a relay of the Mark II computer in 1947?
A moth
A moth was pulled from Relay #70 of the Mark II at Harvard and taped into the logbook with the note 'First actual case of bug being found'; Hopper loved retelling the story.
Q 28Which museum holds the remains of the famous 1947 computer bug?
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds the Mark II logbook page with the taped-in insect; the word 'bug' for a fault predates it, with Edison using it in the 1870s.
Q 29How long were the pieces of wire Hopper handed out to represent a nanosecond?
About 11.8 inches
About 11.8 inches (30 cm) is how far light travels in a vacuum in one nanosecond, so each wire showed the farthest a signal could go; a 984-foot coil stood for a microsecond.
Q 30What did Hopper hand out to represent picoseconds in her later lectures?
Packets of pepper
Packets of pepper came later: she called each grain a picosecond, a thousandth of a nanosecond, to make the point that computers had to be small to be fast.