grace hopper
Grace Hopper
Grace Murry Hopper (1906–1992) was a Ph.D. mathematician, a computer scientist, an educator, and a very successful spokesperson for the field of computer science and for women in computing. Quoting from About Grace Hopper: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.
Grace Murry Hopper (1906–1992) was a Ph.D. mathematician, a computer scientist, an educator, and a very successful spokesperson for the field of computer science and for women in computing. Quoting from About Grace Hopper: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.