Google is showing a doodle on its homepage today honoring computer scientist Grace Hopper on what would have been her 107th birthday.
Hopper, born in 1906, was a computer scientist and U.S. Navy rear admiral, who was one of the first Harvard Mark I computer programmers, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. She is also credited with conceptualizing the basis for the COBOL programming language and popularizing the term “debugging”.
Hopper passed away in 1992. Here’s a 1984 photo of her (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons):
The doodle is animated, and shows Hopper entering commands into a supercomputer.
The doodle appropriately comes during Computer Science Education Week, which is encouraging people to learn an hour of code (which Google is also promoting on its homepage). President Obama has also put out a video encouraging Americans to learn to code.
Typically, Google shows a smaller version of its doodles on the search results pages, but today, Google is showing a different, simpler doodle for Hopper:
It’s worth noting that while Hopper was an American, Google is showing the doodle(s) throughout the world.