How Grace Hopper’s Career Cracked the Code for Women in Science

Grace Hopper’s accomplishments revolutionized the computing world for decades, but
her wit and foresight continue to inspire innovators today.

Grace Hopper’s office was fairly typical, except perhaps for the pirate flag and the clock
that ran backwards.

“The most dangerous phrase is, ‘We’ve always done it this way,’” Hopper was famous
for saying.

That reversing timepiece and Jolly Roger flag were reminders that challenges could
often be overcome by approaching them in novel ways, sometimes by bucking the
system.

“Amazing Grace” Hopper — also known as The Queen of Computing, The Queen of
Coding, Admiral Grace, Grandma COBOL, and The Grand Old Lady of Software — is
recognized worldwide for her pioneering work in programming the first large-scale
digital computer and for creating the first compiler. The latter paved the way for the first
programming language that didn’t require a PhD in mathematics.

“Grace Hopper was a trailblazer for women like me to follow,” said Rahima
Mohammed, a principal engineer in Intel’s Platform Engineering Group, who has five
patents and more than 100 papers in her name. “She broke through gender and corporate
barriers and inspired a new generation of technology developers and entrepreneurs to
follow their own paths to bring new important concepts and products to market.”
Defying the odds

Born December 6, 1906, in New York City, Grace Brewster Murray came of age during
the 1920s. Smart and level-headed, Hopper studied math and physics at Vassar College,
then went on to earn a master’s degree and PhD in mathematics from Yale, becoming
one of the first women to do so.

Along the way, she married Vincent Foster Hopper, becoming Grace Hopper (a name
she kept even after the couple divorced), and landed a job as a math professor at Vassar.

She might have stayed there her entire career if not for an historic event.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Hopper said in a speech recorded in
the documentary, “The world was in a very, very critical state. Everybody in the country
tried to do something for that war effort.”

Though Hopper was 37 and considered too old for the military, she convinced a
recruiter to accept her as a reservist in the U.S. Navy WAVES program and graduated
first in her class.

Lieutenant Hopper was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation team at Harvard
tasked with developing a machine that could make fast, scientific calculations to
understand such wartime things as the trajectories of warheads. This work gave birth to
one of the first digital computers.

The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or the “Mark I”, was huge,
measuring 81 feet in length, eight feet high, eight feet wide and weighing some 10,000
pounds.

Hopper’s job was to program it.

This involved translating mathematical problems into a numeric language the computer
could understand. Though Hopper knew nothing about programming at the start, she
learned quickly on the job.

“Grace is well known for ‘seeking forgiveness, not permission,’” said Jeni Panhorst, a
computer engineer who serves as chief of staff for Intel’s Network Platforms Group.
“She used to say ‘If it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it because it’s much easier to
apologize than it is to get permission.’”

Panhorst has seen this principle firsthand in her group’s work to transform the network
infrastructure industry.

“This spirit of taking risks, coloring outside the lines, and changing the game is what
truly makes a difference,” said Panhorst.

The most complicated problem Hopper and her team were asked to solve came in the
fall of 1944 from John von Neumann, a mathematician and physicist working on the
Manhattan Project. The challenge was to find a way to make a ball collapse in on itself,
to mathematically calculate where force points should be positioned on a sphere to
cause it to implode.

The Mark I ran calculations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for three months, until
Hopper and team came through with a solution that was then applied to the designs of
the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered less than a
week later, ending WWII.
Incidentally, when the Mark II (successor to the Mark I) encountered a glitch one day, it
turned out that a moth had been drawn by the glow of vacuum tubes, fluttered in and got
stuck in one of the electrical switches inside the machine. Hopper remarked that they
had to “debug” the computer. The phrase stuck, becoming popular terminology in the
computer science field.

A new chapter

After the war, Hopper accepted a position with Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation
and helped develop the “UNIVAC,” a name that became synonymous with “computer”.

She also created the first compiler, a program that translates human readable language
into computer executable machine language. This was a revolutionary concept that
greatly reduced the cost of translating computer programs to run on different hardware.

“I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it,” she once famously said. “They
told me computers could only do arithmetic.”

Hopper joined a consortium called Conference on Data Systems Languages

(CODASYL), tasked with developing a standard programming language for all
computer. The group created Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), which
is still used in some industries today.

Return to the Navy

In 1967, the Navy invited Hopper to return to active duty to help standardize
communication between different computer languages. She was 60 at the time, and the
assignment was supposed to be a six-month gig. It lasted 19 years.

During that time, Hopper became a spokesperson for the Navy, giving hundreds of talks
about her experience in early days of computing and challenging the next generation to
pick up the baton and carry it forward.

“Grace was simultaneously brilliant, spunky, irreverent and caring,” said Panhorst. “She
used her brilliance for good. She knew how to make and take a joke. She knew when
the best decision was to break the rules. She knew that people, more specifically young
people, were the most important place to focus.”

One of the things that made Hopper such a popular teacher was her use of clever
illustrations and analogies to help her audience make connections. During many of her
speaking engagements, she distributed pieces of wire which were exactly 11.8 inches
long, explaining that the length represented a nanosecond, the maximum distance that
light or electricity could travel in a billionth of a second.

“When an admiral asks you why it takes so damn long to send a message via satellite,”
Hopper told talk-show host David Letterman in 1986, while explaining the concept of a
nanosecond. “You point out to him that, between here and the satellite, there are a very
large number of nanoseconds.”
 Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USN (covered).

Legacy

When Hopper retired from the Navy in 1986, she was 79 and the oldest active officer in
service. After her retirement, Hopper served as a goodwill ambassador and lecturer for
Digital Equipment Corporation.

She died in 1992 at the age of 85, but during her lifetime, Hopper received many
prestigious awards.

She received the first ever Computer Science “Man of the Year” Award from the Data
Processing Management Association, became the first woman and first American to be
named a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, and was awarded the
Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat decoration awarded by
the Department of Defense. She was presented with the National Medal of Technology
in 1991, becoming the first female individual recipient of the honor.

Everything from computer centers, scholarships, a Navy destroyer and a Google Doodle
have been named for her, but the honor Hopper might have liked best is the Grace
Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Considered the world’s largest gathering
of women technologists, the annual event was established in 1992 by the Anita Borg
Institute for Women and Technology (ABI).

“The most important thing I’ve accomplished, other than building the compiler, is
training young people,” Hopper once told biographer Lynn Gilbert. “I keep track of
them as they get older, and I stir them up at intervals so they don’t forget to take
chances.”

This year’s GHC event held in Houston on October 14 to 16, is expected to draw more
than 12,000 attendees from around the world.

“This event is truly a celebration of the breadth and depth of women in computing
fields, with over 500 presenters speaking on topics ranging from new applications of
artificial intelligence to the latest research on human-computer interactions,” said Mon
Sabet, director of GHC.

“Grace Hopper was not only an incredible mathematician and computer scientist during
a time which was particularly challenging to be a woman in this role, she was also
passionate about mentoring young people,” says Gabriela Gonzalez, a STEM strategist
at Intel.

“Her legacy as a technology pioneer and woman of vision will continue to pave the way
for the broader inclusion of women across all technology sectors for generations to
come.”