Caricature of Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), American computer scientist and US Navy Rear Admiral. Hopper trained as a mathematician at Yale. In 1943 she joined the US Naval Reserve, and worked as a programmer on the Harvard Mark I, Mark II and Mark III computers. In 1949 she began work with the team developing the UNIVAC computer, and in the early 1950s carried out pioneering work on computer compiling programs. She also did much work on the COBOL programming language. Hopper retired in 1986 with the rank of Rear Admiral.