| Grace Hopper awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom - 11/16/2016 |
| Grace Hopper awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom (posthumously) |
| Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, known as “Amazing Grace” and “the first lady of software,” was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (posthumously) by President Obama during a ceremony at the White House on November 22, 2016. She was at the forefront of computers and programming development from the 1940s through the 1980s. Hopper’s work helped make coding languages more practical and accessible, and she created the first COBOL compiler, which translates source code from one language into another. She taught mathematics as an associate professor at Vassar College before joining the United States Naval Reserve as a lieutenant (junior grade) during World War II, where she became one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and began her lifelong leadership role in the field of computer science. |