Grace Hopper

For more information on Grace Murray Hopper, visit Britannica.com.

American mathematician and computer scientist (1906–1992)

Hopper, born Grace Murray, was educated at Vassar and at Yale, where she gained her PhD in 1934. She taught at Vassar until 1944, when she enlisted in the US Naval Reserve and was immediately assigned to Harvard to work with Howard Aiken on the Mark I computer, the ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator), for which she wrote the manual. Although she hoped to remain in the Navy after the war, her age prevented this and she had to be satisfied with the Naval reserve as a second choice. Consequently she remained at Harvard working on the Mark II and the Mark III computers.

In 1949 Hopper moved to Philadelphia to work with J. P. Eckhart and John Mauchly on the development of BINAC and remained with the company, despite several changes of ownership, until 1967. During this period she made a number of basic contributions to computer programming. In 1952 she devised the first compiler, a program that translated a high-level language into machine code, named A-O. She went on to produce a data-processing compiler known as Flow-matic.

It was apparent by this time to Hopper and other programmers that the business world lacked an agreed and adequate computer language. Hopper lobbied for a combined effort from the large computer companies and consequently a committee was established in 1959 under the guidance of the Defense Department to develop a common business language. Although she did not serve on the committee, the language developed by them, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), was derived in many respects from Flow-matic. For this reason Hopper has often been referred to as ‘the mother of COBOL’.

Although Hopper was forced through age to resign from the US Naval reserve in 1966 she was recalled a year later to work on their payroll program. She remained in the Naval reserve until 1986, having by then been promoted to the rank of rear admiral in 1985.

With the longest active military career, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was also known as "Amazing Grace" and "Grand Old Lady of Software." She played an instrumental role in the development of the COBOL computer programming language.

Grace Hopper, who rose through Navy ranks to become a rear admiral at age eighty-two, is best known for her contribution to the design and development of the COBOL programming language for business applications. Her professional life spanned the growth of modern computer science, from her work as a young Navy lieutenant programming an early calculating machine to her creation of sophisticated software for microcomputers. She was an influential force and a legendary figure in the development of programming languages. In 1991, President George Bush presented her with the National Medal of Technology "for her pioneering accomplishments" in the field of data processing.

Admiral Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray on December 9, 1906, in New York City. She was the first child of Marry Campbell Van Horne Murray and Walter Fletcher Murray. Encouraged by her parents to develop her natural mechanical abilities, she disassembled and examined gadgets around the home, and she excelled at mathematics in school. Her grandfather had been a senior civil engineer for New York City who inspired her strong interest in geometry and mathematics.

At Vassar College, Hopper indulged her mathematical interests, and also took courses in physics and engineering. She graduated in 1928, then attended Yale, where she received a master's degree in 1930 and a doctorate in 1934. These were rare achievements, especially for a woman. As Robert Slater points out in Portraits in Silicon, U.S. doctorates in mathematics numbered only 1, 279 between 1862 and 1934. Despite bleak prospects for female mathematicians in teaching beyond the high school level, Vassar College hired her first as an instructor, then as a professor of mathematics. Hopper taught at Vassar until the beginning of World War II. She lived with her husband, Vincent Foster Hopper, whom she had married in 1930. They were divorced in 1945 and had no children.

In 1943, Hopper joined the U.S. Naval Reserve, attending midshipman's school and obtaining a commission as a lieutenant in 1944. She was immediately assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard. The project, directed by Howard Aiken, was her first introduction to Aiken's task, which was to devise a machine that would assist the Navy in making rapid, difficult computations for such projects as laying a mine field. In other words, Aiken was in the process of building and programming America's first programmable digital computer - the Mark I.

For Hopper, the experience was both disconcerting and instructive. Without any background in computing, she was handed a code book and asked to begin computations. With the help of two ensigns assigned to the project and a sudden plunge into the works of computer pioneer Charles Babbage, Hopper began a crash course on the current state of computation by way of what Aiken called "a computing engine."

The Mark I was the first digital computer to be programmed sequentially. Thus, Hopper experienced firsthand the complexities and frustration that have always been the hallmark of the programming field. The exacting code of machine language could be easily misread or incorrectly written. To reduce the number of programming errors, Hopper and her colleagues collected programs that were free of error and generated a catalogue of subroutines that could be used to develop new programs. By this time, the Mark II had been built. Aiken's team used the two computers side by side, effectively achieving an early instance of multiprocessing.

By the end of the war, Hopper had become enamored of Navy life, but her age - a mere forty years - precluded a transfer from the WAVES into the regular Navy. She remained in the Navy Reserves and stayed on at the Harvard Computational Laboratory as a research fellow, where she continued her work on the Mark computer series. The problem of computer errors continued to plague the Mark team. One day, noticing that the computer had failed, Hopper and her colleagues discovered a moth in a faulty relay. The insect was removed and fixed to the page of a logbook as the "first actual bug found." The words "bug" and "debugging, " now familiar terms in computer vocabulary, are attributed to Hopper. In 1949, she left Harvard to take up the position of senior mathematician in a start-up company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Begun in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the company had by 1949 developed the Binary Automatic Computer, or BINAC, and was in the process of introducing the first Universal Automatic Computer, or UNIVAC. The Eckert-Mauchly UNIVAC, which recorded information on high-speed magnetic tape rather than on punched cards, was an immediate success. The company was later bought by Sperry Corporation. Hopper stayed with the organization and in 1952 became the systems engineer and director of automatic programming for the UNIVAC Division of Sperry, a post she held until 1964.

Hopper's association with UNIVAC resulted in several important advances in the field of programming. Still aware of the constant problems caused by programming errors, Hopper developed an innovative program that would translate the programmer's language into machine language. This first compiler, called "A-O, " allowed the programmer to write in a higher-level symbolic language, without having to worry about the tedious binary language of endless numbers that were needed to communicate with the machine itself.

One of the challenges Hopper had to meet in her work on the compiler was that of how to achieve "forward jumps" in a program that had yet to be written. In Grace Hopper, Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer, Charlene Billings explains that Hopper used a strategy from her schooldays - the forward pass in basketball. Forbidden under the rules for women's basketball to dribble more than once, one teammate would routinely pass the basketball down the court to another, then run down the court herself and be in a position to receive the ball and make the basket. Hopper defined what she called a "neutral corner" as a little segment at the end of the computer memory which allowed her a safe space in which to "jump forward" from a given routine, and flag the operation with a message. As each routine was run, it scouted for messages and jumped back and forth, essentially running in a single pass.

During the early 1950s, Hopper began to write articles and deliver papers on her programming innovations. Her first publication, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, " detailed her initial work on Mark I. "The Education of a Computer, " offered in 1952 at a conference of the Association of Computing Machinery, outlined many ideas on software. An article appearing in a 1953 issue of Computers and Automation, "Compiling Routines, " laid out principles of compiling. In addition to numerous articles and papers, Hopper published a book on computing entitled Understanding Computers, with Steven Mandrell.

Having demonstrated that computers are programmable and capable not only of doing arithmetic, but manipulating symbols as well, Hopper worked steadily to improve the design and effectiveness of programming languages. In 1957, she and her staff at UNIVAC created Flow-matic, the first program using English language words. Flow-matic was later incorporated into COBOL, and, according to Jean E. Sammet, constituted Hopper's most direct and vital contribution to COBOL.

The story of COBOL's development illustrated Hopper's wide-reaching influence in the field of programming. IBM had developed FORTRAN, the densely mathematical programming language best suited to scientists. But no comparable language existed for business, despite the clear advantages that computers offered in the area of information processing.

By 1959, it was obvious that a standard programming language was necessary for the business community. Flow-matic was an obvious prototype for a business programming language. At that time, however, IBM and Honeywell were developing their own competing programs. Without cooperative effort, the possibility of a standard language to be used throughout the business world was slim. Hopper, who campaigned for standardization of computers and programming throughout her life, arguing that the lack of standardization created vast inefficiency and waste, was disturbed by this prospect.

The problem was how to achieve a common business language without running afoul of anti-trust laws. In April 1959, a small group of academics and representatives of the computer industry, Hopper among them, met to discuss a standard programming language specifically tailored for the business community. They proposed contacting the Defense Department, which contracted heavily with the business industry, to coordinate a plan, and in May a larger group met with Charles Phillips. The result was the formation of several committees charged with overseeing the design and development of the language that would eventually be known as COBOL - an acronym for "Common Business Oriented Language." Hopper served as a technical advisor to the Executive Committee.

The unique and far-ranging aspects of COBOL included its readability and its portability. Whereas IBM's FORTRAN used a highly condensed, mathematical code, COBOL used common English language words. COBOL was written for use on different computers and intended to be independent of any one computer company. Hopper championed the use of COBOL in her own work at Sperry, bringing to fruition a COBOL compiler concurrently with RCA in what was dubbed the "Computer Translating Race." Both companies successfully demonstrated their compilers in late 1960.

Hopper was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1962 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1963. She was awarded the Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award in 1964. She continued her work with Sperry, and in 1964 was appointed staff scientist of systems programming, in the UNIVAC Division.

While at Sperry, Hopper remained active in the Navy Reserves, retiring with great reluctance in 1966. But only seven months later, she was asked to direct the standardization of high level languages in the Navy. She returned to active duty in 1967 and was exempted from mandatory retirement at age of sixty-two. She served in the Navy until age seventy-one.

Although she continued to work at Sperry Corporation until 1971, her activities with the Navy brought her increasing recognition as a spokesperson for the usefulness of computers. In 1969, she was named "Man of the Year" by the Data Processing Management Association. In the next two decades, she would garner numerous awards and honorary degrees, including election as a fellow of the Association of Computer Programmers and Analysts (1972), election to membership in the National Academy of Engineering (1973), election as a distinguished fellow of the British Computer Society (1973), the Navy Meritorious Service Medal (1980), induction into the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame (1984), and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal (1986). She lectured widely and took on vested interests in the computer industry, pushing for greater standardization and compatibility in programming and hardware.

Hopper's years with the Navy brought steady promotions. She became captain on the retired list of the Naval Reserve in 1973 and commodore in 1983. In 1985 she earned the rank of rear admiral before retiring in 1986. But her professional life did not end there. She became a senior consultant for the Digital Equipment Corporation immediately after leaving the Navy and worked there until her death, on January 1, 1992. In its obituary, the New York Times noted that "[l]ike another Navy figure, Admiral Rickover, Admiral Hopper was known for her combative personality and her unorthodox approach." Unlike many of her colleagues in the early days of computers, Hopper believed in making computers and programming languages increasingly available and accessible to nonspecialists.

Further Reading

Billings, Charlene W., Grace Hopper, Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer, Enslow, 1989.

Slater, Robert, Portraits in Silicon, MIT Press, 1987.

New York Times, January 3, 1992.

Sammet, Jean E., "Farewell to Grace Hopper - End of an Era!, " in Communications of the AMC, April, 1992.

Quotes:

"One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions."

Grace Murray Hopper
December 9, 1906 (1906-12-09) – January 1, 1992 (1992-02) (aged 85)
Grace Hopper
Place of birth	New York City, New York
Place of death	Arlington, Virginia
Allegiance	United States of America
Service/branch	United States Navy
Years of service	1943-1966, 1967-1971, 1972-1986.
Rank	Rear Admiral
Awards	Defense Distinguished Service Medal Legion of Merit Meritorious Service Medal American Campaign Medal World War II Victory Medal National Defense Service Medal Armed Forces Reserve Medal with two Hourglass Devices Naval Reserve Medal

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Naval officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} She conceptualized and led the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is also credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches (motivated by an actual moth removed from the computer). Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace". The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) (see below) was named for her.

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 World War II Naval Service 3 UNIVAC 4 COBOL 5 Standards 6 Retirement 7 Honors 8 Anecdotes 9 Notable Quotations 10 Obituary Notices 11 See also 12 References 13 Further reading 14 External links

Early life and education

Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray in New York City. For her preparatory school education, she attended the Hartridge School in Plainfield, NJ. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1928 and pursued her graduate education at Yale University, where she received a Master's degree in those subjects in 1930. She married Vincent Hopper (a Ph.D. in English who for many years was chairman of the NYU English department) in 1930. In 1934, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale.^[6] Her dissertation was titled New Types of Irreducibility Criteria.^[7] Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and by 1941 she was an associate professor. She and Dr. Vincent Hopper divorced in 1945.

World War II Naval Service

In 1943, Hopper obtained a leave of absence from Vassar and was sworn in to the United States Navy Reserve, one of many women to volunteer to serve in the WAVES. She reported in December and trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Hopper graduated first in her class in 1944, and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University as a Lieutenant, junior grade. She served on the Mark I computer programming staff headed by Howard H. Aiken. Hopper and Aiken coauthored three papers on the Mark I,II,II also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Hopper's request to transfer to the regular Navy at the end of the war was declined due to her age (38). She continued to serve in the United States Navy Reserve. Hopper remained at the Harvard Computation Lab until 1949, turning down a full professorship at Vassar in favor of working as a research fellow under a Navy contract at Harvard.^[8]

UNIVAC

In 1949, Hopper became an employee of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician and joined the team developing the UNIVAC I. In the early 1950s the company was taken over by the Remington Rand corporation and it was while she was working for them that her original compiler work was done. The compiler was known as the A compiler and its first version was A-0. Later versions were released commercially as the ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC compilers.

COBOL

COBOL was defined by the CODASYL committee which extended Hopper's FLOW-MATIC language with some ideas from the IBM equivalent, the COMTRAN. However, it was her idea that programs could be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code or languages close to machine code (such as assembly language), which is how it was normally done at that time. It is fair to say that COBOL was based very much on her philosophy.

From 1967 to 1977, Hopper served as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy's Office of Information Systems Planning and was promoted to the rank of Captain in 1973.^[8] She developed validation software for the programming language COBOL and its compiler as part of a COBOL standardization program for the entire Navy.^[8]

Standards

In the 1970s, she pioneered the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components, most significantly for early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL. The Navy tests for conformance to these standards led to significant convergence among the programming language dialects of the major computer vendors. In the 1980s, these tests (and their official administration) were assumed by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), known today as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Retirement

Grace Hopper (January 1984)

Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of Commander at the end of 1966. She was recalled to active duty in August 1967 for a six-month period that turned into an indefinite assignment. She again retired in 1971 but was asked to return to active duty again in 1972. She was promoted to Captain in 1973 by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr.

After Rep. Philip Crane saw her on a March 1983 segment of 60 Minutes, he championed H.J.RES.341 a joint resolution in the House of Representatives which led to her promotion to Commodore by special Presidential appointment.^[9] In 1985, the rank of Commodore was renamed Rear Admiral, Lower Half. She retired (involuntarily) from the Navy on August 14, 1986. At a celebration held in Boston on the USS Constitution to celebrate her retirement, Hopper was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat award possible by the Department of Defense. At the moment of her retirement, she was the oldest officer in the United States Navy, and aboard the oldest ship in the United States Navy.^[10]

She was then hired as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, a position she retained until her death in 1992, aged 85.

Her primary activity in this capacity was as a Goodwill Ambassador, lecturing widely on the early days of computers, her career, and on efforts that computer vendors could take to make life easier for their users. She visited a large fraction of Digital's engineering facilities where she generally received a standing ovation at the conclusion of her remarks. Although she was an interesting and competent speaker, the most memorable part of these talks was her illustration of a nanosecond. She salvaged obsolete Bell System 25 pair telephone cable, cut it to 11 inch (28 cm) lengths (which is the distance that light travels in one nanosecond) and handed out the individual wires to her listeners. She always wore her Navy full dress uniform to these lectures.

She was laid to rest with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery; Section 59, grave 973.^[11]

Honors

• 1969 – She won the first "man of the year" award from the Data Processing Management Association.
• 1971 – The annual "Grace Murray Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Computer Professionals" was established in 1971 by the Association for Computing Machinery.
• 1973 – She became the first person from the United States and the first woman of any nationality to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.
• 1986 – Upon her retirement she received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.
• 1987 – She became a Computer History Museum Fellow Award Recipient.
• 1988 – She received the Golden Gavel Award at the Toastmasters International convention in Washington, DC.
• 1991 – She received the National Medal of Technology.
• 1996 – USS Hopper (DDG-70) was launched. Nicknamed Amazing Grace, it is on a very short list of U.S. military vessels named after women.
• 2001 - Eavan Boland wrote a poem dedicated to Grace Hopper titled "Code" in her 2001 release "Against Love Poetry"

The Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center is located at 7 Grace Hopper Avenue in Monterey, California.

Grace Murray Hopper Park, located on South Joyce Street in Arlington, Virginia, is a small memorial park in front of her former residence (River House Apartments) and is now owned by Arlington County, Virginia.

Women at the world's largest software company, Microsoft Corporation, formed an employee group called "Hoppers" and established a scholarship in her honor. Hoppers has over 3000 members worldwide.

Brewster Academy, a school located in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, United States, dedicated their computer lab to her in 1985, calling it the Grace Murray Hopper Center for Computer Learning. Hopper had spent her childhood summers at a family home in Wolfeboro.

An administration building on Naval Support Activity Annapolis (Previously known as Naval Station Annapolis) in Annapolis, Maryland is named "The Grace Hopper Building" in her honor.

Anecdotes

Photo of first computer bug

Throughout much of her later career, Grace Hopper was much in demand as a speaker at various computer-related events. She was well-known for her lively and irreverent speaking style, as well as a rich treasury of early "war stories". She also received the nickname "Grandma COBOL".

• While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University in 1947, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. Though the term computer bug cannot be definitively attributed to Admiral Hopper, she did bring the term into popularity.^[12] The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.^[13]
• Grace Hopper is famous for her nanoseconds visual aid. People (such as generals and admirals) used to ask her why satellite communication took so long. She started handing out pieces of wire which were just under one foot long, which is the distance that light travels in one nanosecond. She gave these pieces of wire the metonym "nanoseconds." Later she used the same pieces of wire to illustrate why computers had to be small to be fast. At many of her talks and visits, she handed out "nanoseconds" to everyone in the audience, contrasting them with a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long, representing a microsecond. Later, while giving these lectures while working for DEC, she passed out packets of pepper which she called picoseconds.^[14]

Notable Quotations

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Grace Hopper

• The famous quotation "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" is often attributed to Grace Hopper.^[15]
• Also attributed to her is the quote, "A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what a ship is built for."^[16]

Obituary Notices

• Betts, Mitch (Computerworld 26: 14, 1992)
• Bromberg, Howard (IEEE Software 9: 103–104, 1992)
• Danca, Richard A. (Federal Computing Week 6: 26–27, 1992)
• Hancock, Bill (Digital Review 9: 40, 1992)
• Power, Kevin (Government Computer News 11: 70, 1992)
• Sammet, J.E. (Communications of the ACM 35 (4): 128–131, 1992)
• Weiss, Eric A. (IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14: 56–58, 1992)

See also

Software Testing portal

World War II portal

• Women in computing
• Systems engineering
• Women in the United States Navy

United States Navy portal

References

1. ^ Richard L. Wexelblat, ed. (1981). History of Programming Languages. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-745040-8. 
2. ^ Donald D. Spencer (1985). Computers and Information Processing. C.E. Merrill Publishing Co. ISBN 9780675202909. 
3. ^ Phillip A. Laplante (2001). Dictionary of computer science, engineering, and technology. CRC Press. ISBN 9780849326912. 
4. ^ Bryan H. Bunch, Alexander Hellemans (1993). The Timetables of Technology: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Technology. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9780671769185. 
5. ^ Bernhelm Booss-Bavnbek, Jens Høyrup (2003). Mathematics and War. Birkhäuser. ISBN 9783764316341. 
6. ^ Rajaraman, V. (February 2001). "Grace Murray Hopper — Programming pioneer". Resonance 6 (2). doi:10.1007/BF02836935. 
7. ^ G.M. Hopper and O. Ore, New types of irreducibility criteria, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 40 (1934) 216
8. ^ ^{a b c} Williams, Kathleen Broome (2001). Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 9781557509611. 
9. ^ "Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, USN". Biographies in Naval History. United States Navy Naval Historical Center. http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm. Retrieved 2007-05-28. "...at the age of 76, she was promoted to Commodore by special Presidential appointment...." 
10. ^ UPI (1986-08-15). "Computer Whiz Retires from Navy". Detroit Free Press: p. 4A. 
11. ^ Grace Hopper at Find a Grave
12. ^ Taylor, Alexander L., III (April 16, 1984). "The Wizard Inside the Machine". TIME. http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,954266,00.html. Retrieved 2007-02-17. 
13. ^ "Log Book With Computer Bug". National Museum of American History. http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=30. Retrieved 2008-03-27. 
14. ^ McKenzie, Marianne. "The amazing Grace Hopper". http://wayne.home.texas.net/~wayne/grace1.html. Retrieved 2008-03-27. 
15. ^ Hamblen, Diane. "Only the Limits of Our Imagination: An exclusive interview with RADM Grace M. Hopper". Department of the Navy Information Technology Magazine. http://www.chips.navy.mil/archives/86_jul/interview.html. Retrieved 2007-01-31. 
16. ^ Tropp, Henry S. (Fall 1984). "Grace Hopper: The Youthful Teacher of Us All". Abacus 2 (1): 18. ISSN 0724-6722. 

Further reading

• Beyer, Kurt W. (2009-09-30). Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (1st ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262013109. 
• Williams, Kathleen Broome (2004-11-15). Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (1st ed.). Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1557509529. 
• Marx, Christy (August 2003). Grace Hopper: the first woman to program the first computer in the United States. Women hall of famers in mathematics and science (1st ed.). New York City: Rosen Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0823938773. 
• Williams, Kathleen Broome (2001). Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 9781557509611.  Williams' book focuses on the lives and contributions of four notable women scientists: Mary Sears (1905-1997); Florence van Straten (1913-1992); Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992); Mina Spiegel Rees (1902-1997).

External links

• Extensive Grace Hopper Biography and Images from the United States Navy Naval Historical Center
• Grace Hopper links from Chips, the United States Navy information technology magazine
• "Grace Murray Hopper", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Grace Hopper", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• A shorter Hopper biography, which unfortunately perpetuates the myth that she coined the term "computer bug".
• Biography and Wit and Wisdom from a Yale website
• www.GraceHopper.org site for the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
• www.hopper.navy.mil Official United States Navy website for the USS Hopper, which includes a biography of Hopper
• Rear Admiral Grace Hopper with pages about the lady and the ship named after her
• Grace Murray Hopper Award
• The Government Technology Leadership Awards: The Gracies
• Biography from the San Diego Supercomputer Center
• More details and photos from the moth/bug in the Mark II
• Grace Hopper at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Grace Hopper at Find a Grave Retrieved on July 26, 2008

v • d • e Notable Women General and Flag Officers in the U.S. Military Ann E. Dunwoody · Alene B. Duerk · Anna Mae Hays · Susan J. Helms · Elizabeth P. Hoisington · Jeanne M. Holm · Grace Hopper · Leslie F. Kenne · Claudia Kennedy · Fran McKee · Carol Mutter · Ann E. Rondeau · Patricia Ann Tracey

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