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Grace Hopper (1906–1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944, invented the first compiler for a computer programming language, and helped popularize the idea of machine-independent programming languages. This led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.

In recognition of Hopper's contributions, the destroyer USS Hopper is named for her, as is the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC.Photograph: James S. Davis