Bath Iron
Works Corporation's eleventh ARLEIGH
BURKE Class Destroyer, DDG 70, is named in honor of Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper,
a mathematician and pioneer in data processing who was a legendary figure among both
computer scientists and industry executives.
She was in the Navy, as an active-duty officer or a reservist, for 43 years beginning in World War II. In 1983, she received a special Presidential appointment to the rank of rear admiral. In 1982, with the retirement of Admiral Hyman J. Rickover, Admiral Hopper became the oldest officer on active duty in the armed service, which she remained until her retirement in 1986.
The admiral made several vital contributions to the development of modern computing systems, including helping invent the Cobol programming language, which is in widespread use in business.
In September 1991, President George Bush awarded her the National Medal of Technology "for her pioneering accomplishments in the development of computer technology and opened the door to a significantly larger universe of users."
Admiral Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray in New York City. After receiving a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, she taught math at Vassar College, her alma mater, where she later became an associate professor. She was divorced in 1945 but kept her married name.
In 1943, Dr. Hopper joined the Navy. As a lieutenant assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, she worked as a programmer on a calculating device called the Mark I, a precursor to electronic computers.
Leaving the Navy in 1946, she remained at Harvard as a faculty member in the computation laboratory. She continued to work on early Navy computers and maintained her Naval career as a reservist. Although retired from the Navy reserve in 1966, then Commander Hopper was recalled within a year to active duty to oversee a program to standardize the Navy's computer programs and languages.
Her work led to the first practical compiler for modern computers. A compiler is a program that translates instructions written by a human programmer into more specific codes that can be directly read by computers.
At the time of her death, she was a senior consultant to the Digital Equipment Corporation. She joined Digital in 1986 shortly after her retirement from the Navy.
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