Question 1

Who was Grace Hopper, and did she find the first computer bug?

Accepted Answer

**Grace Hopper** (1906–1992) was a mathematician and US Navy officer who did more than almost anyone to make programming something other than writing machine instructions by hand. The bug story is true in its details and false in its usual implication.

**Her career.** A PhD mathematician from Yale, she joined the Navy Reserve during the Second World War and was assigned to the **Harvard Mark I** — one of the first large-scale computers — where she was among its earliest programmers and wrote a substantial manual for it.

**Her genuinely major contribution** is the idea that a computer could translate **human-readable instructions** into machine code. In 1952 she produced the **A-0 system**, one of the first compilers, at a time when the prevailing view was that computers could only do arithmetic and that the idea was not worth pursuing. She had to argue the point for years.

She went on to develop **FLOW-MATIC**, the first programming language using English-like statements, which directly influenced **COBOL** — a language she is closely associated with, and which ran, and in places still runs, an enormous share of the world's business and banking systems. She was not COBOL's sole author, but she was its most effective advocate and a key figure behind its design.

She also pushed hard for **machine independence** — the then-radical idea that a program should run on more than one manufacturer's hardware.

She retired from the Navy as a **rear admiral**, having been recalled from retirement twice.

**The bug.** In 1947, operators working on the **Harvard Mark II** found a moth caught in a relay, removed it, and taped it into the logbook with the note that it was the "first actual case of bug being found". The logbook and moth survive.

**But "bug" already meant a technical fault** — the usage predates this by decades and appears in Edison's correspondence. The joke in the logbook **only works because the term was familiar**, which is precisely what people miss when they cite it as the origin.

Question 2

Who was Ada Lovelace and what did she actually do?

Accepted Answer

Ada Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron in 1815, was a British mathematician best known for her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine — a mechanical general-purpose computer that was designed in

Question 3

Who was Katherine Johnson?

Accepted Answer

A mathematician at NASA whose calculations of orbital trajectories were central to the early American crewed spaceflight programme — and who worked for years in a segregated unit, doing work that was

Question 4

Who was Alan Turing and what happened to him after the war?

Accepted Answer

Alan Turing was a British mathematician whose 1936 paper on computable numbers introduced the theoretical machine that underpins modern computing, and who went on to play a central role in breaking

Question 5

Did Hedy Lamarr really invent something important?

Accepted Answer

Yes. She co-patented a frequency-hopping system for torpedo guidance that anticipated techniques underlying modern wireless communication — and the popular framing that she "invented Wi-Fi"

Question 6

Who was Émilie du Châtelet?

Accepted Answer

A French natural philosopher and mathematician of the early eighteenth century whose translation and commentary on Newton's Principia remains the standard French edition — and whose own work on

Question 7

Who was Hypatia of Alexandria?

Accepted Answer

Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who taught in Alexandria around AD 400, and one of the few women scholars of the ancient world whose reputation is securely documented by

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