by 
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper is not widely known but was a trailblazer in many ways. Hopper was a New York native. She got her masters and Ph.D. in mathematics and physics from Yale in the 1930s. Hopper not only broke down gender barriers in the field of programming but also in the US Navy, two spaces that continue to be male dominant today. Grace Hopper’s societal and intellectual accomplishments are beyond admirable.
At the beginning of World War II Hopper felt an obligation to serve her country. She was initially rejected from the Navy due to her age but was ultimately accepted. When she retired at the age of 79, she was the oldest serving officer across all of the US Armed Forces. During the war, she helped calculate trajectories of rockets, calibrate minesweepers, and calculate the range of anti-aircraft weapons. Hopper also worked on calculations connected to the atomic bombs. After the war, Hopper continued her programming career at Harvard. Harvard is where Hopper helped program the Mark I, II, and III, which were the earliest forms of a computer. Hopper wrote the manual for the Mark-I, which was over 500 pages long and spells out how the Mark-I systematically and mathematically functioned. While working on the Mark-I she and her team had to take apart the machine because it was not working, and they found a large moth to be the root of the problem. It was then that the programming term “bug” was coined in the context of computers malfunctioning. If that was not impressive enough, she also helped make the programming languages and ensured that the language was standardized and word-based to be friendly to those outside the world of programming.
What is so impressive and unique about Grace Hopper compared to other women in stem is that she helped to create the foundations of the field of computer science, which is now male-dominated. While it does not reflect well on society that programming has been stigmatized as masculine it only makes Grace Hopper’s contributions more meaningful. In the past years, there has been a push to teach young girls how to code. Specifically, in the US, there is a national organization called Girls Who Code, which helps bring free programming education to girls in the 3rd through 12th grade.
When I began learning how to code in middle school Grace Hopper was one of the first programmers I learned about. I was in the unique position of having a female coding teacher and a class of mostly girls, but as I continued to code in high school this changed. At one point, I was part of a coding program where I was one of two only two girls. Unlike Grace Hopper and many other women in stem, I had the benefit of starting in the field surrounded by women and was not fazed by the abundance of male peers. Grace Hopper has left a lasting impression on me, but more importantly, she left a lasting impact on the programming world and the US military.
Source:
https://news.yale.edu/2017/02/10/grace-murray-hopper-1906-1992-legacy-innovation-and-service