This evening the White House announced the 2016 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.
Most notably Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, the “first lady of software” aka “Grandma COBOL,” was one of the recipients. She invented the first compiler leading to the development of COBOL (yes Millennials, I am showing my age here). More interestingly, Admiral Hopper is famous for her nanoseconds visual aid. When asked why satellite communication took so long, she would pull a piece of wire out of her pocket that was just under one foot long (11.80 inches)—the distance that light travels in one nanosecond.
Admiral Hopper was not the only “technologist” honored. President Obama also named Margaret Hamilton, a mathematician and computer scientist who led the team that created the on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo command modules and lunar modules, and Richard Garwin, a polymath physicist who earned a Ph.D. under Enrico Fermi at age 21 (!) and subsequently made pioneering contributions to low-temperature and nuclear physics, detection of gravitational radiation, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and computer systems. He also named Maya Lin the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.
For a complete list of the 2016 recipients see the White House announcement:
President Obama Names Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom | whitehouse.gov
