Navy Veteran Grace Hopper was a rear admiral of the United States Navy and an innovator in the realm of computer science. She earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale and became a professor of mathematics at Vassar College before deciding to serve during World War II. In 1943 Hopper was sworn in to the Naval Reserve and received her commission as a lieutenant, junior grade. She was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard, where she served as one of the first programmers f