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Grace Hopper was born in New York City in December 1906. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1934. Grace served in the U.S. Navy retiring with the rank of commander. During her service, as a lieutenant junior grade, Grace was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Havard. Later, she served on the programming staff of the Mark I computer project and co-authored with Howard Aiken three papers on the Mark I. In 1949 Hopper began working with the team developing the UNIVAC I. While working on this project Grace developed her original compiler, the A compiler. During the period from 1967 through 1977 Grace developed validation software for COBOL as part of a COBOL standardization program for the entire Navy. Later, Grace did similar work on FORTRAN.
Commander Hopper received numerous pretigious awards including being the first woman to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. She also received a Computer History Museum Fellow Award and the National Medal of Technology. In 1971 the ACM established the annual Grace Murray Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Computer Professionals. Grace passed away on January 1, 1992.