Grace Murray Hopper

Grace Murray Hopper was a computer scientist and mathematician whose career took shape from her work in analytic support in wartime. She was also the developer of the first compiler, a contributor to the program language COBOL, and later the developer of one of its progenitors. Her experience and philosophy have a huge impact on the evolution of digital computing and interaction design.

Grace Hopper was born in 1906 in New York City, graduated from Vassar, and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1934. She then returned to Vassar as faculty and was promoted to associate professor in 1941. She demanded her students to describe and solve the math problems in cogent written English. To her, the understanding of the problem is more important than their solutions. Identifying the right problem to solve is crucial to make sure the technical work contributes to an operational solution. Later, she took a partial leave to study advanced mathematical analysis methods with Richard Courant at New York University.

In the 40s and 50s, computers were not programmed to interact with users. The programming language was written by scientists so it was difficult to understand, fix, and connect with other computers. Grace Hopper saw this problem and determined to “free mathematicians to do mathematics.”  The goal was for programs to be legible not only to programmers but also to managers and nonexperts, broadening its intelligibility, making it less of a guild knowledge. Her 1952 program compiled this complicated language into machine code that enabled mathematicians to write programs faster and more efficiently. She was ahead of her time in addressing open communication between the technology and the users. User accessibility is one of the most effective of interaction design that Grace Hopper had advocated for. She also maximized the efficiency in programing by reusing the current models and improving the system rather than making a completely new model. This idea is important for modern interaction design. These characterizations suggest an emerging collaborative working environment of the digital humanities.

Grace Hopper was a mathematical analyst, a computer scientist but most important to interaction design history, she was a pioneer in the use of computing to open communication between designers and users.

Biblography

Grudin, Jonathan, and Gayna Williams. “Two Women Who Pioneered User-Centered Design.” Microsoft Research, 17 Oct. 2018, www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/two-women-pioneered-user-centered-design/.

Burk, Robin. “Remembering Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1986).” Phalanx, vol. 50, no. 2, 2017, pp. 63–68. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26296392. Accessed 26 Sept. 2020.

FLANDERS, JULIA. “Building Otherwise.” Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis; London, 2018, pp. 289–304. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv9hj9r9.19. Accessed 26 Sept. 2020.