During Women’s History Month, it is good to remember and to honor Admiral Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper was a pioneering computer scientist and a United States Navy Rear Admiral. Hopper received a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale. She was nicknamed “Amazing Grace” and is often referred to as the “mother of computing.”
In October of 2020, the U.S. Naval Academy officially opened Hopper Hall, the academy’s new center for cybersecurity studies, named in her honor. The cybersecurity facility is the first building named after a woman at the three main service academies.
Military.com quotes Rear Adm. Carl Lahti saying that Hopper Hall represents the future of the Navy, adding that the building shows the commitment of the Navy to advancements in cybersecurity and cyber warfare. “We do not know what is going to come out of the heads of the midshipmen who are being trained here, but what it is going to be is great and glorious,” he said.
Hopper attempted to enlist in the Navy at the start of World War II but was rejected due to her age, 34, and her weight. She was too thin. In 1943, she joined the U.S. Navy Reserve and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University where she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer. She would go on to develop the first compiler and to work on the first machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL and other languages. In the 1970s, she advocated for networked computing and for standardization and testing of programming languages, a standard that was adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Naval Reserve regulations required that Hopper retire at age 60, but she was called back to active duty twice before her final retirement. In 1985, she was promoted to Rear Admiral. She retired (involuntarily) from the Navy on August 14, 1986, a few months before her 80th birthday. After leaving the Navy, she served as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, until her death in 1992, at the age of 85.
In 2017, Yale University renamed Calhoun College the Grace Hopper College in honor of Grace Murray Hopper.
On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Admiral Hopper had previously been recognized by the naming of the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper in her honor. USS Hopper is only the second U.S. Navy warship to be named for a woman from the Navy’s own ranks. Hopper’s great-grandfather was an admiral in the US Navy during the Civil War.