Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, USN

Commodore Hopper in 1984
Photo: U. S. Navy via www.wikipedia.org

  Grace Hopper served in the U S Navy from 1943 until 1996, with two brief (less than a year) breaks.  She was born in 1906 (today, her birthday, she would have been 107), educated at Vassar in Mathematics and Physics, she worked in the labs at Harvard University.
  She joined the WAVES of the U S Naval Reserve in 1943 with an exemption for her weight, she weighed 15 pounds less than the 120 pound minimum, she served in the Bureau of Ships, where the Navy Computer Labs were in infancy.
  She wrote the first computer language that was close to English and is know today as COBOL.  She is the person who coined the term "debugging" after she removed a moth from a computer to solve a problem.
  She is one of the very few women with a Navy ship named for them, the USS Hopper DDG-70 was commissioned in 1996 and is know as "Amazing Grace"!
  If you look at the website Google you will find an animation of Admiral Hopper, one of my personal heroes, at work.

Seasonal photo:

Ryan McDermott at Gooches Beach, Kennebunk, Maine last week
Photo: Portland Press Herald