About Grace Hopper
|
|
| Audience/Grade: | College Freshman - Continuing Education |
| Discipline(s): |
Computer Engineering Computer Science Computing Diversity Engineering Diversity Information Systems Information Technology Software Engineering |
| Special Topic(s): |
History of Technology Women and Information Technology |
| Learning Resource Type: | Reference - Article/Document |
| Media Type: | WWW |
| Author(s): |
Merry Maisel
Organization: San Diego Supercomputing Center - SDSC |
| Description: | Tribute to Grace Hopper on the Grace Hopper Conference website. Excerpt" "Most of us remember seeing Rear 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, Rear 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 rear 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. . . Her work on compilers and on making machines understand ordinary language instructions led ultimately to the development of the business language COBOL. Hopper’s work also foreshadowed or embodied enormous numbers of developments that are still the very bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula translation, relative addressing, the linking loader, code optimization, and symbolic manipulation. At her death, she was an active consultant for Digital." |
| Rating: |
  |
| Related Resources | |
| Keywords: | Admiral Grace Hopper, Grace Hopper Celebration conference, gender equity, women in computing |
| Is Component of |
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing |
| Usage Tip | |
| Use of Resource: | Tribute to Grace Hopper with history and personal notes. |
| Difficulty: | Easy |
| Interactivity Level: | Low |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | 2008 |
| Platform/Format: | WWW |
| Cost: | Free |
| Download URL: | http://gracehopper.org/2008/about/about-grace-hopper/ |
| Metadata: | IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
|
