Born in New York City on December 9, 1906, Grace Murray, whose father believed that his daughters should have the same educational opportunities as his son, attended Vassar College and received a B.A. in mathematics in 1928. At Yale University she earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in mathematics, and returned to Vassar to teach mathematics. In 1930 she married Vincent Foster Hopper; the couple divorced in 1945.
During World War II, she took a leave of absence from Vassar and joined WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) as a commissioned lieutenant, junior grade. Her naval assignment took her to Harvard, where she worked on the Bureau of Ordnances Computation Project. In 1945, while working on the Mark I computer that her team at Harvard developed, she discovered a moth in the computer╒s circuitry and coined the term ╥bug╙ to refer to computer glitches.
In 1946 Hopper left active naval duty and resigned from Vassar in order to pursue a career that combined academic, business and military positions. She remained at Harvard as a faculty member, and then joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia, where she wrote code for the first commercial, large-scale, electronic computer (Univac I). Her work also led to the development of the first practical compiler, 1952, which translates instructions from a computer programmer into codes the computer reads. In the 1960s she helped develop COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), a widely-used computer language that allows commands to be written using an English-based vocabulary rather than in machine code.
In 1966 Hopper retired from the navy as a commander but was recalled to active duty the following year to oversee the standardization of the navy╒s computer languages. In 1982, she became the oldest officer on active duty in the armed services, and in 1983, President Ronald Reagan promoted her to the rank of commodore, which was elevated to rear admiral in 1985. Her retirement in 1986 marked forty-three years of service in the military.
During her long career she published over 50 articles on software and programming languages and was honored many times. In 1969, the Data Processing Management Association selected her as its first computer sciences ╥Man of the Year.╙ President Bush awarded her the National Medal of Technology in 1991╤the first time the award was given solely to a woman. She held honorary doctorates from many universities and New Hampshire decreed November 7, 1983, as Captain Grace Murray Hopper Day in honor of the dedication of the Grace Murray Hopper Center for Computer Learning at Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro. Known for her unorthodox, blunt style, and for smoking unfiltered cigarettes, she once called the women╒s movement ╥tommyrot and nonsense.╙ She died at her home in Arlington, Virginia on January 1, 1992.
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