However she was determined to join the Navy and, despite being told that she could serve her country best by remaining in her teaching post at Vassar College, she eventually persuaded the Naval Reserve to accept her in 1943 and she also persuaded Vassar College to grant her leave.Īfter initial training at Midshipman's School, after which she was commissioned a Lieutenant, Hopper was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at the Cruft Laboratories at Harvard University. However her at 34 she was too old (and not heavy enough for her height ) to enlist and anyway as a mathematics professor her job was considered essential to the war effort.

Hopper wanted to join the military as soon as the United States entered World War II. Hopper attended New York University as a Vassar Faculty Fellow in 1941. Hopper was awarded her doctorate by Yale University in 1934 for a thesis New Types of Irreducibility Criteria which was supervised by Øystein Ore. In 1931 she began teaching mathematics at Vassar College as an instructor in the Department of Mathematics and she continued on the staff there until 1943, having been promoted by that time to an associate professorship. A Vassar College Fellowship allowed her to study at Yale University and, also in 1930, Yale awarded her an MA. In 1930 Grace Murray married Vincent Foster Hopper, an English teacher from New York University. After graduating she undertook research in mathematics at Yale University. She studied mathematics and physics at Vassar College graduating with a BA in 1928. She spent the academic year at Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey then entered Vassar College in 1924.

Intending to enter Vassar College in 1923 she failed a Latin examination and was required to wait another year. Grace was educated at two private schools for girls, namely Graham School and Schoonmakers School both in New York City. Unable to reassemble it, she took to pieces the other seven clocks she found in the house before her mother discovered what was happening. There were certainly signs in Grace's childhood of her fascination with machines and in there is a delightful story of how, when she was seven years old, she took her alarm clock to pieces to find out how it worked. It also describes her hobbies of needlepoint, reading and playing the piano. It tells of summers spent with her cousins in their cottage on Lake Wentworth in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire and the games they played there such as kick-the-can, hide-and-seek and cops-and-robbers. The book contains a fascinating account of her childhood. Both Grace's parents believed that she and her sister should have an education of the same quality as her brother.

Her father, Walter Murray, was an insurance broker while her mother, Mary Van Horne, had a love of mathematics which she passed on to her daughter. Biography Grace Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray, the oldest of three children.

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