Who is Grace Hopper?

Grace Hopper was an influential woman in the areas of STEM and computer engineering. She was an American computer scientist and a United States Rear Admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first “linkers”, programs used to link multiple files together, for computing. 

Rear Admiral Hopper popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language, or code, still in use today.

While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University in 1947, her associates discovered a moth that was stuck in a relay, which caused it to stop working. While neither Hopper nor her crew mentioned the phrase "debugging" in their logs, the case was held as an instance of literal "debugging." For many years, the term bug had been in use in engineering. The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Grace Hopper STEM Academy, located in Inglewood, was opened in 2012 as a conduit to inspire a new generation of girls to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math in her honor.