Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, November 22nd, 2016, President Obama awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom

to 21 Americans, among them a woman by the name of Grace Hopper. Hopper, a mathematician and physicist, joined the

Navy in 1943 where she worked as a programmer and Coder on lots of the earliest efforts

towards electronic computing.

She would come to be known as the Queen of Code, and that is what we're talking about today,

Grace Hopper's contributions to computing her place in history alongside a lot of other women whose names we may not know as well.

So we hooked it to 2016, but really we're talking about the mid-40s into the early 50s here and

here to discuss as always is Nicole Hammer of Columbia.

Hello Nicky.

Hi Jody.

And our guest is Mar Hicks historian of technology and the author of the book

Programmed Inequality and Associate Professor of History at Illinois

Tech University. Mar, thank you for joining us here.

Thanks for having me.

So I kind of want to just get a sense of Grace Hopper's how well known she is. I mean she strikes me as kind of like right on the cusp of like maybe the most well known hidden figure or something, but you know she did win a presidential medal freedom there have been some books she

shows up in movies from time to time but like give us that context about how much she is

hidden history and how much she is lionized as the Queen of Code.

Sure well I think it's important when we use the term hidden figure to really make clear

that that is a term that applies to black women, black women in computing.

And so I wouldn't call Grace Hopper a hidden figure. I would say that in some ways

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