Grace Hopper (1906–1992) was the US Navy rear admiral and computer scientist who built the first compiler in 1952 — letting programmers write in words instead of machine code — and drove the creation of COBOL, the business language that still runs much of the world's finance.
A Vassar mathematics professor who joined the Navy in 1943, she worked on the Harvard Mark I under Howard Aiken, then spent four decades dragging the industry, by force of personality, toward programming languages humans could read.
