Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper born 9th December 1906 was an American computer genius and an officer in the US Navy.
She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for any computer programming language.
Her work led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages due to her bringing to life the idea of machine-independent programming languages.
She is credited with coining the phrase "debugging" when fixing computer code by removing an actual moth the computer she was working on in 1945. This act is said to have taken place on the 9th September 1945.
Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is quite rightly referred to as "Amazing Grace".
Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
