Jean E. Sammet (March 23, 1928 – May 20, 2017) was an American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962.
She joined IBM in 1961 where she developed FORMAC, the first widely used computer language for symbolic manipulation of mathematical formulas.
Sammet had a strong interest in mathematics but was unable to attend the Bronx High School of Science because it did not accept girls.
Sammet fought this determination, stating that her knowledge of New Jersey history did not strengthen her ability to teach mathematics in high school.
Sammet worked as a teaching assistant at Barnard College during the 1952-1953 school year before she decided that the academic life was not for her.
Her first task was to write the basic loader for the SPEEDAC, which was a 20-line program that took three days to toggle into the computer by hand in binary.
The “open shop” consisted of programmers acting as consultants to the engineers and involved scientists who assisted them in writing and testing their routines.
[1] In fall of 1956, Sammet taught one of the earliest graduate-level courses in computer programming in the Applied Mathematics department of Adelphi College (now University) on Long Island.
Despite the fact that Adelphi did not have a computer and few textbooks on programming existed at the time, Sammet was able to instruct two courses for two years.
The classified job advertisements at the time were separated by gender and Sammet was unable to find a position for a woman in any field she was interested in so she decided to scan the men’s list and found an engineer position at Sylvania Electric Products in Needham, Massachusetts.
[1] In 1959, Sammet and five other programmers established much of the design of the influential COBOL programming language, in a proposal written in a span of two weeks that was eventually accepted by Sylvania's U.S. government clients.
[10] In order to gain interest in SICSAM, Sammet wrote letters to people she identified through publications and what was happening in the field at that time.
Sammet states that she fought her way to give a paper at SIGNUM because the group was not interested in non-numerical analysis of that kind of an activity.
With assistance from those interested in SICSAM, Sammet organized a conference held in March 1966, which was the Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation (SYMSAM).
Sammet has stated that these conferences were organized based on the recognition of how fundamental programming languages were to different aspects within computing.