Grace Murray Hopper is the woman engineer ATS is honoring today for the U.S. National Women’s History Month of March.  Grace was born in 1906 in New York City.   She graduated from Vassar College in in 1928 with a B.A. in mathematics and physics. Her first job was as a member of the Vassar College faculty.
Ms. Hopper later earned both an MA and Ph. D. in Mathematics from Yale University.  She joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943 to help the U.S. during WWII.  She eventually resigned from Vassar’s faculty to join Harvard University’s Computational Lab as a research fellow in engineering and applied physics. By 1967, Ms. Hopper became Admiral Hopper and started to become involved with programming computers. Her first was the Mark I Computer which she became the third person to program it. She went on to work with the Mark I, Mark II and Mark III computers, receiving the Naval Ordinance Development Award for her pioneering work programming these systems. Admiral Hopper believed that the only thing keeping computers from being deployed outside of scientific arenas were programming languages the every day person could use. It took her several years, but, she was able to demonstrate this concept successfully.