McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP is proud to celebrate Women’s History Month in March in recognition of it as an annual celebration of achievements by women in spotlighting their critical role in U.S. history. In this regard, we are highlighting noteworthy women inventors whose creations changed the world.
Grace Hopper was a mathematician, computer scientist and US Navy rear admiral who began her computer science career when all programs were written in numerical code. As a result of Hopper recognizing that programming would be more accessible if people could code in their own language, she invented the first compiler in 1952 by essentially teaching computers to “talk.” She was the first person to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages. The FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, the first universal programming language used in business and government.