GraceHopper.org
Title
Welcome! - Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing (GHC 2006)
Description
Most of us remember seeing Admiral Grace Murray Hopper on television. We recall a charming, tiny, white-haired lady in a Navy uniform with a lot of braid, admonishing a class of young Naval officers to remember their nanoseconds. The “nanoseconds” she handed out were lengths of wire, cut to not quite 12 inches in length, equal to the distance traveled by electromagnetic waves along the wire in the space of a nanosecond–one billionth of a second. In teaching efficient programming methods, Admiral Hopper wanted to make sure her students would not waste nanoseconds. Occasionally, to make the demonstration even more powerful, she would bring to class an entire “microsecond”–a coil of wire nearly 1,000 feet long that the admiral, herself tough and wiry, would brandish with a sweeping gesture and a steady wrist.
The vividness of our impression of Hopper as a great teacher derives from these images. But, as computer pioneer Howard Bromberg has written, Hopper was much more. She was a “mathematician, computer scientist, social scientist, corporate politician, marketing whiz, systems designer, and programmer,” and, always, a “visionary.” After graduating from Vassar with a degree in mathematics in 1928, Grace Brewster Murray worked under algebraist Oystein Ore at Yale for her Ph.D. (1934). She married Vincent Foster Hopper, an educator, in 1930, and began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931.
The Murrays were a family with a long military tradition; Grace Hopper’s ancestors had served in the American Revolutionary War. Thus it surprised no one when she resigned her Vassar post to join the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) in 1943. Commissioned as a lieutenant, she reported in 1944 to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. She was the third person to join the research team of Professor (and Naval Reserve lieutenant) Howard H. Aiken, who had requested her months earlier and greeted her with the words, “Where the hell have you been?” Then he pointed to the Mark I electromechanical computing machine: “There’s the machine. Compute the coefficients of the arc tangent series by next Thursday.” Hopper plunged in and learned what the machine could do with a clever mathematician at the helm. By the end of World War II in 1945, she was working on the Mark II. Although her marriage was dissolved at this point, and though she had no children, she did not resume her maiden name. She was appointed to the Harvard faculty as a research fellow, and in 1949 she joined the newly formed Eckert-Mauchly Corporation, founded by the builders of ENIAC, one of the first electronic digital computers.
Languages
English
Contact
- Anita Borg Institute
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- Palo Alto CA
- United States 94304
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- +1.650857390
