Amazing Grace

Hopper at the UNIVAC, 1957                    photo taken for Philadelphia Inquirer

Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was one of those amazing people most of the rest of us mortals never hear about. What made her amazing was not just the things she managed to accomplish but that she did them at a time when women weren't expected to be interested in, let alone doing, such things. Things like continuing to serve in the Naval Reserve past the war and eventually attaining the rank of rear admiral and becoming the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the Navy. Things like getting a PhD in mathematics from Yale and going on to invent the first compiler for a programming language, popularizing the term "debugging," and being the driving force behind the development of the computing language COBOL. "What I felt was that there was a large number of people in the country who did not like symbols. They were not mathematicians, and they hated symbols, so let them write their programs in English," she recalled of her role. "It was common sense." Common sense from a very uncommon person (video): http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-queen-of-code/