when Sperry Gyroscope merged with one of its competitors, Remington Rand, she met Remington Rand’s senior programmer, Grace Hopper. Hopper—who liked to call herself “the third programmer of the first computer”—had made a similar blind leap from mathematics to programming after being enlisted, by the Navy, to run the Mark I computer at Harvard during the Second World War. Like Jean, she’d had to teach herself the job.
