Jean E. Sammet, a pioneering American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language and who served as the first female president of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), passed away May 21 at the age of 89. Despite her strong interest in mathematics, she was unable to attend the Bronx High School of Science because it did not accept girls; she attended instead the now-defunct all-girls Julia Richman High School, where she took every available math course.

Her life, efforts and triumphs are a good reminder of the formidable obstacles women faced then and of the significant obstacles they still often face in pursuing science as a career in modern society. Excellent tribute articles are posted on The New York Times website (Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89) and the ACM website (In Memoriam: Jean E. Sammet 1928-2017). The ACM piece recounts the circuitous path she was forced to take to rise in computer science and is well worth reading.

She is famously remembered for saying, “I thought of a computer as some obscene piece of hardware that I wanted nothing to do with,” in an interview in 2000. As noted in The New York Times piece written by Steve Lohr, “[H]er initial aversion was not unusual among the math purists of the time, long before computer science emerged as an academic discipline. Later, Ms. Sammet tried programming calculations onto cardboard punched cards, which were then fed into a computer.”

“To my utter astonishment,” she said, “I loved it.”

Link to YouTube video of Sammet receiving the 2009 IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PVqBBAxFlU

According to the NYT article both her parents, Harry and Ruth Sammet, were lawyers. Jean excelled in math starting in the first grade and chose to attend college at Mount Holyoke because it had an excellent mathematics department. Her programming career included stints at Sperry Gyroscope and its successor Sperry Rand, and Sylvania Electric before she joined IBM in 1961. Sammet was part of the team that created COBOL and she developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962. She was also a historian and advocate for her profession. Her book, “Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals,” published in 1969, “was, and remains, a classic” in the field, said Dag Spicer, senior curator of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Ms. Sammet was a graduate student in mathematics when she first encountered a computer in 1949 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She wasn’t impressed.

Link to ACM article: https://cacm.acm.org/news/217652-in-memoriam-jean-e-sammet-1928-2017/fulltext

Link to The New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html?_r=0

Feature Image: The New York Times/Ben Shneiderman