At the Grace Hopper Celebration (www.gracehopper.org) we celebrate the impact that women have on the field of computing. We feel that Admiral Grace Hopper is a great role model which is why we honor her by naming our celebration after her. The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a program of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (www.anitaborg.org).
Admiral Grace Hopper was a “mathematician, computer scientist, social scientist, corporate politician, marketing whiz, systems designer, and programmer,” and, always, a “visionary.” 
After graduating from Vassar with a degree in mathematics in 1928, Grace Brewster Murray worked under algebraist Oystein Ore at Yale for her Ph.D.
Her best-known contribution to computing during this period was the invention, in 1953, of the compiler, the intermediate program that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer. She did this, she said, because she was “lazy” and hoped that “the programmer may return to being a mathematician.” Her work on compilers and on making machines understand ordinary language instructions led ultimately to the development of the business language COBOL.
