Grace Murray Hopper was a pioneering computer scientist born in 1906 in New York City. She showed an early aptitude for math and received advanced degrees from Vassar College and Yale University. During World War II, she joined the Navy and worked on the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, one of the earliest computers. She wrote an extensive manual on its operation and continued working on computer development after the war. Hopper made many contributions to computer programming and languages over her career.