The Birthday of Grace Hopper (1906)

Grace Hopper invented the first compiler (A‑0) and co‑developed COBOL. She popularised the term ‘debugging’ after finding a moth in a relay. She believed that programming should be in English, not machine code. Her work on compilers is a form of automatic translation – a mathematical mapping from a high‑level language to machine code (a homomorphism). She also worked on the UNIVAC and standardised floating‑point arithmetic. She rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. Hopper showed that mathematics and computer science are about making things easier, not harder.