Grace Hopper's Life And Accomplishments

Grace Hopper, born as Grace Murray on December 9, 1906 in New York City. She was known to be curious about how things worked throughout her life. When she was seven, she took apart an alarm clock to see how it worked, but couldn’t get it back together, so she took apart another and ran into the same problem, so she took apart another one. By the time she was done, she had taken apart seven alarm clocks. She probably would have torn apart more but her mother stopped her. She applied to Vassar College when she was 16, but she was rejected due to low Latin scores, but she got accepted the next year. She graduated with Bachelor’s Degrees in Mathematics and Physics in 1928. She then went to Yale and earned her Master’s Degree in 1930. Around the same time she married Vincent Hopper, a professor at New York University. In 1931, she went back to Vassar College to teach math, but she got her PhD in Mathematics from Yale in 1934. In 1943, Hopper took a leave of absence from Vassar to join the United States Navy as part of the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) during World War II. By 1944 she had graduate top of her class, was given the rank of lieutenant, and was made part of …show more content…
In 1947, while she was working on the US Navy’s Mark II Computer, as a coworker discovered that a moth was stuck in Relay 70, which was causing glitches in the Mark II. She remarked that there was a bug in the system and they debugged it. While she neither coined the term “bug” or “debugging”, as Thomas Edison is credited with coining “bug” to refer to a problem with the engineering and “debugging” had been used by aeronautic engineers for a while, Hopper did popularize it in referring to computers. She and her associates are also probably the first to find an actual bug in the computer that is causing the problem. After this incident she said “From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in