Engineers

Grace Hopper

Citation Formats

General Reference

Technology and Engineering Atlas. "Grace Hopper." Accessed August 29, 2026. https://dev-technology.interactiveatlas.org/engineers/grace-hopper.

APA Style

Technology and Engineering Atlas. (n.d.). Grace Hopper. Retrieved August 29, 2026, from https://dev-technology.interactiveatlas.org/engineers/grace-hopper

BibTeX

@misc{technologyandengineeringatlas-grace-hopper,
  author = {Technology and Engineering Atlas},
  title = {Grace Hopper},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-technology.interactiveatlas.org/engineers/grace-hopper},
  note = {Accessed August 29, 2026}
}

Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral who pioneered machine independent programming languages. Working on the Harvard Mark I during the Second World War and later on the UNIVAC I, she wrote the first compiler, a program that translates human readable source code into machine code, and her team development work fed directly into COBOL, one of the first widely used business programming languages. She is also credited with popularizing the term debugging after her team traced a computer malfunction to a moth trapped in a relay.

Facts

Birth Year

1906 1

Death Year

1992 1

Nationality

American 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

In Field

Software Engineering

Source Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information AgeKurt W. Beyer

Sources

1. Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

Kurt W. Beyer, MIT Press, 2009

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