You might not know the name Grace Hopper, but it’d be hard to imagine our lives without her work. In today’s episode of Fierce — a new podcast from iHeartRadio and Tribeca Studios, which highlights the extraordinary women who never made it into our history books — host Jo Piazza explains how Grace invented the first computer language amid World War II. 

Though the military held few places for women back then, Grace knew she had to join the war effort, so she joined a team at Harvard working on the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the United States. Grace’s job was to figure out how to program it, but she didn’t stop there. She taught humans to communicate with machines in a way that made the computer vastly more useful than it was originally intended to be.

Tune into Fierce to hear Jo discuss Grace’s legacy with Parisa Tabriz, a director of engineering at Google — and a proud owner of a cat named Grace Hopper.

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