MATH-MATIC was written beginning around 1955 by a team led by Charles Katz under the direction of Grace Hopper.
Syntactically, MATH-MATIC was similar to Univac's contemporaneous business-oriented language, FLOW-MATIC, differing in providing algebraic-style expressions and floating-point arithmetic, and arrays rather than record structures.
Expressions in MATH-MATIC could contain numeric exponents, including decimals and fractions, by way of a custom typewriter.
MATH-MATIC allowed for larger programs, automatically generating code to read overlay segments from UNISERVO tape as required.
[6] In contrast to Backus' FORTRAN, MATH-MATIC did not emphasise execution speed of compiled programs.