Admiral Grace Hopper was a pioneering computer scientist and a United States Navy officer. Born on December 9, 1906, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and played a crucial role in developing early programming languages. She is best known for her work on the COBOL language, which is still used in business applications today. Hopper was also instrumental in popularizing the concept of machine-independent programming, which allows code to run on different computer systems. Throughout her career, she received numerous awards and honors, including the National Medal of Technology and the title of "Computer Science Man of the Year" in 1969.