“Getting frustrated only stops you.”
Grace Hopper
When World War II began, Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) was a PhD mathematician teaching at Vassar College. She joined the US Navy in 1943 and applied her math skills to writing code for the Mark I, a new electromechanical calculator at Harvard’s Cruft Laboratory. Hopper’s instructions for running complex computations were punched into paper tapes, like the segment from “Problem L” seen here. (Problem L calculated mathematical tables that had applications in radio, sound, and frequency modulation.) Hopper was one of the first woman programmers. In her lifelong computing career, she pioneered ways to make communication between humans and computers more user-friendly.
Source for quote above: domer1987, “Oral History Interview of Captain Grace Murray Hopper by Angeline Pantages,” Domer1987’s Blog (blog), August 12, 2010, https://domer1987.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/oral-history-interview-of-captain-grace-murray-hopper-by-angeline-pantages/.