📍Wolfeboro, NH 03894, USA
1913 – 1924“I grew up in New York City, but the place I loved most as a child was our family's summer cottage on Lake Wentworth, in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, where we went every year. My grandfather, Alexander Wilson Russell, was a senior civil engineer for the City of New York, and my father, Walter Murray, was an insurance broker; both believed girls should have the same chances as boys, and my mother, Mary, loved mathematics herself at a time when women were rarely encouraged to study it. The lake was a world of freedom. My cousins and I played kick-the-can and hide-and-seek in the woods, swam, and paddled and sailed canoes. One gust of wind tipped me out of a sail canoe into the lake, and I learned to respect the weather. I was always curious about how things worked. When I was seven, I took apart my alarm clock to see what made it tick, and when I couldn't put it back together, I took apart another, and then several more, before my mother caught me and limited me to one clock. That habit of taking things apart and putting them together in new ways stayed with me. I studied mathematics at Vassar and Yale, joined the Navy in the Second World War, and worked on the Harvard Mark I computer. I went on to develop the first compiler and helped create the programming language COBOL, insisting that computers should understand words, not just numbers. It all began with a curious girl, a lake in New Hampshire, and a pile of clock parts.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today