Grace Hopper

"How did you know so much about computers?"

"I didn't. It was the first one." -Grace Hopper

Throughout her career, Hopper worked on the Mark I computer at United States Naval Reserve’s Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, one of the earliest working computers, as well its later generations Mark II and III. She also led the team that invented COBOL, a language which is still used today. She is also known to have coined the term “debug” to rid a computer of glitches after lifting an actual moth from the inner workings of a Mark II computer. Hopper earned her PhD in mathematics from Yale on top of a Bachelors degree from Vassar, and enlisted in the Navy at age 37. She received the National Medal of Technology, the Data Processing Management Association’s "computer sciences man of the year” award, and the Defense Distinguished Service medal.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. It is the world’s largest gathering of women in computing. The Grace Hopper Celebration is presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Association for Computing Machinery.