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A Yale Pioneer
The
Freshman Address
November/December 2009
by
Richard C. Levin ’74PhD
Rick
Levin ’74PhD is the president of Yale University. This address was delivered in
Woolsey Hall on August 29, 2009, to the Yale College Class of 2013.
Members
of the Class of 2013, I am
delighted to join Dean Miller in welcoming you to Yale College. I want to
welcome also the relatives and friends who have accompanied you here, and
especially your parents. As a father of four college graduates, I know how
proud you parents are of your children’s achievement, how hopeful you are for
their future, and how many concerns—large and small—you have. Let me try to provide
some comfort. Students love it here! And surveys have shown that Yale parents
are the most satisfied in the Ivy League. So, welcome to the Yale family. We
are so pleased to have your children with us, and we will do our best to
provide them with abundant opportunities to learn and thrive in the four years
ahead.
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“Surveys have shown that Yale parents are the most satisfied in the Ivy League.” |
And
to you, the Class of 2013, I make the same pledge. For you, these next four
years will be a time of opportunity unlike any other. Here you are surrounded
by astonishing resources: fascinating fellow students from all over the world,
a learned and caring faculty, intimate residential college communities, a
magnificent library, two extraordinary art museums, superb athletic facilities,
and student organizations covering every conceivable interest—the performing
arts, politics, and community service among them. You will have complete
freedom to explore, learn about new subjects, meet new people, and pursue new
passions.
A
few weeks ago I was browsing in a bookstore when I noticed a new biography of
Grace Murray Hopper. In a flash, I knew that I would buy the book, read it, and
tell you about her, one of the most extraordinary women ever to attend Yale,
when you arrived here. What a perfect topic for this season, the fortieth
anniversary of the first enrollment of women in Yale College.
I
imagine that only a small number of you have ever heard of Grace Hopper. She
was the first woman to receive a Yale PhD in mathematics, one of the first
women in the nation to reach the rank of admiral in the U.S. Navy, and the
first graduate of our mathematics department to be awarded the Graduate
School’s Wilbur Cross Medal for distinguished contributions to scholarship and
public service. She made her mark on the nation and the world as a pioneer in
computer programming, leading some of the most important advances in the field
as it developed in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Her story speaks to anyone who
seeks self-improvement through education and hard work, and, most particularly,
to you. I hope that Admiral Hopper’s voyage will inspire you as much as it has
inspired me.
Grace
Murray Hopper was born in 1906 into comfortable circumstances on the Upper West
Side of New York City. Her father was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale College
and a successful insurance company executive. Her mother was a housewife with a
passion for puzzles and mathematics. Both parents encouraged their daughter's
intellectual pursuits. Grace was an avid reader, and she took an early interest
in building. She spent many hours as a child assembling things from the nuts,
bolts, and metal pieces of her toy construction kit. Her passion for tinkering
served her well in the 1940s, when her ability to diagnose mechanical failures
and repair computers made a tangible difference in the nation’s effort during
World War II.
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Hopper audited courses in astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, philosophy, economics, and architecture.
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When
time came for college, her father’s alma mater, Yale, was not open to her, so
her sights were set on Vassar, one of the colleges that then attracted the most
able young women in the country. To her dismay, young Grace failed the entry
examination in Latin and had to take an extra year to remedy the deficiency
before entering Vassar in 1924. She learned from this failure. She had no
natural aptitude for grammar or spoken foreign languages, but she learned that
languages (and much else) could be mastered by sheer determination and
perseverance. Years later, she would dazzle audiences by writing in German left-handed
on the blackboard until she had filled the board to her left. Then she would
switch the chalk to her right hand and proceed to fill the blackboard to her
right in French!
At
Vassar, Hopper pursued a double major in mathematics and physics. She considered
preparing herself for a career in engineering, but she recognized that, unlike
today, there was at the time virtually no place for women in engineering. So
she planned on studying and eventually teaching mathematics. Upon graduation
she won a fellowship to study at Yale, where she earned a master’s degree in
mathematics in three years. She then returned to Vassar to join the faculty and
begin her teaching career while completing her Yale dissertation.
She
soon became a legendary teacher, known for animating her mathematics courses
with interesting and relevant practical applications. She audited courses in
astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, philosophy, economics, and
architecture, and drew on all these disciplines to develop unconventional and
imaginative courses of her own. Whatever she taught, the enrollment quickly
soared from ten or fewer to 75. She broke down the barriers between disciplines
and showed her students how mathematics could link one field to another. She
became a highly effective public speaker, a talent that served her well later
in her career. And she was regarded within Vassar as a skillful agent of
change.
Well
established at Vassar College by the age of 34, Grace Hopper could have
contented herself with a life as a teacher, mentor, and campus leader for the
next 40 years. But her modest personal demeanor notwithstanding, she desired
more. She yearned to return to the study of advanced mathematics, and in the
fall of 1941 she took a sabbatical to study partial differential equations at
NYU with the famous mathematician Richard Courant, a refugee who had previously
headed Germany’s most prestigious mathematical institute. This proved another
fortuitous choice, as her new knowledge of partial differential equations
provided another major assist to the war effort just three years later.
The
attack on Pearl Harbor radically changed Grace Hopper’s life. By the time she
finished up her NYU fellowship in the summer of 1942, she was determined to
serve the nation, but the outlet for that service was not yet clear. As soon as
an act of Congress authorized the creation of a women’s corps in the Navy,
Hopper was determined to join. Initially, she was rejected because of her age
and diminutive size, but again, as she so often did, she persevered, finally
convincing the Navy that her talent as a mathematician could be valuable to the
war effort. She expected to become a code-breaker, but, to her surprise, she
was assigned to the position of second in command of the Harvard Computation Lab
under the direction of Howard Aiken in the summer of 1944. She arrived just in
time for the installation of the first mainframe electromechanical computer,
the Mark I, designed by Aiken and built by IBM.
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The team translated John von Neumann’s equations into a computer program.
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Aiken
was a visionary and a stern taskmaster; he had very high expectations for his
subordinates but stood aloof. He was initially disappointed to learn that the
Navy had assigned him a woman as his second in command. Again, Hopper persevered
in the face of initial adversity. Because she worked so hard and was entirely
loyal, she quickly earned Aiken’s confidence. Aiken soon came to rely on
Hopper’s counsel and to trust her completely. Because she was also a better
communicator and a more accessible collaborator than Aiken, Hopper became the
de facto leader of the team.
For
Hopper and her small crew, the challenge was immense. Mark I was capable of
making calculations in minutes that previously took teams of mathematicians
weeks to perform. But for each new problem the machine had to be programmed,
given coded instructions in zeros and ones that described the mechanical
operations required to reach the solution. One tiny error in a program could
bring the machine to a halt; but so could any number of sources of mechanical
failure. Hopper’s experience as a childhood tinkerer made her the lab’s expert
at diagnosing machine failures.
It
was easy enough, conceptually, to program the machine to calculate ballistics
trajectories. But at least one problem was much harder: calculating the amount
of explosive material needed to bring the fissile material in the first atomic
bomb to critical mass. Hopper and her team worked on this problem with the
brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, who developed the partial differential
equations describing the implosion that could trigger a chain reaction. These
equations were of a type that had never before been solved numerically. They
required Hopper to call upon everything she had learned from her year of study
with Courant in order to translate von Neumann’s equations into a computer
program.
Working
day and night under immense pressure for results, Hopper and her small team not
only solved the problems they needed to solve, they also made substantial
progress in conceptualizing how programs might be written most effectively.
During the last year of the war, Hopper made the first of her several
fundamental innovations in programming by inventing the “subroutine,” a program
that could be stored in the machine to handle operations that were required
repeatedly, such as calculating a logarithm. The idea was a fundamental
building block in the field of computer programming.
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“Grace Hopper was the kind of person we hope each of you will become.” |
After
the war, working for Remington Rand, she went a significant step beyond by
inventing the “compiler,” an invention that liberated programmers from having
to be familiar with every physical operation of the computer. And then, most
significantly, Hopper turned her attention to developing a programming language
that was close to ordinary language—a step that would make programming
accessible to a much wider group. She led the development of COBOL, for many
years the most successful and most widely used programming language for both
business and military applications.
In
1967, she resumed active duty as a naval officer, and spent the next 19 years
advising the Navy on its computing operations and serving tirelessly as its
most effective recruiter, encouraging young men and women to enlist and learn
computer skills. In 1983, she was elevated to the rank of commodore, and to
rear admiral two years later. She retired from active duty in 1986, the oldest
officer in the Navy. After she died in 1992, an aircraft carrier was
commissioned in her name.
Grace
Hopper was the kind of person we hope each of you will become: a leader, an
innovator, a person of deep loyalty and commitment, a hard worker, a creative
force. Yale played only a small role in cultivating these qualities within her,
but her brilliant career is a source of great institutional pride.
As
you enter Yale College, with a new world all before you, I urge you to take
inspiration from the story of Grace Hopper.
Pursue
your passions as she pursued hers—from learning math to tinkering to forming
and realizing a vision that computer programs could be written in ordinary
language.
Give
your curiosity free rein. Explore, as she did, every field of study that seems
remotely interesting and find the connections among them.
Invest
in acquiring skills—as she acquired languages, and math, and public speaking.
Stretch
yourself beyond what is comfortable and familiar, as she did when she left
Vassar to push herself to learn more advanced math and as she did again when
she joined the Navy to serve her country.
Work
hard and persevere in the face of initial adversity, as she did when she failed
a college entry exam, when the Navy discouraged her from enlisting, when the
director of the Harvard Computation Lab expressed initial disappointment in her
appointment.
Be
creative without isolating yourself, as she did by pursuing radical innovations
in computing, while at the same time working effectively within organizations
as the glue that held teams of co-workers together.
Recognize
that no one else can define the limits of what is possible for you, as she did
when she chose to pursue an unconventional career before her time and against
all odds.
You
have come to a place that offers you extraordinary opportunities for
self-discovery and self-improvement. May Grace Hopper’s example inspire you to
seize them.
Welcome
to Yale College.  |
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