Grace Murray Hopper

Grace Murray is born on December 9th, 1906 in New York City, New York. Her parents are Walter and Mary Murray. She has a sister Mary, who is 3 years younger than her, and a brother Roger, who is 5 years younger than her.

Grace begins school at Vassar College in New York - studying mathematics and physics.

Grace graduates from Vassar and moves on to study at Yale University, working on a Master's degree in Mathematics.

Grace gets a Master's degree in Mathematics. She also marries Vincent Foster Hopper and becomes Grace Hopper, a name she will keep long after their divorce in 1945.

In 1931, Grace becomes a teacher at Vassar, where she used to go, and also keeps studying at Yale, hoping to get a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

Grace gets her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale, becoming the first woman to earn such a degree.

World War II compels Grace into joining the US Naval Reserve in 1943. She opts for the Navy, as it was her grandfather's branch of service.

Grace is commissioned as lieutenant in 1944, and given her mathematical background, she is assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Project at Harvard, where she learns to program a Mark I computer.

In 1952, her team creates the first compiler for computer languages (a compiler renders worded instructions into code that can be read by computers).

Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve in 1966, but her pioneering computer work meant that she was recalled to active duty—at the age of 60—to tackle standardizing communication between different computer languages. She would remain with the Navy for 19 years. When she retired in 1986, at age 79, she was a rear admiral as well as the oldest serving officer in the service.