Jean Sammet rarely let anything get in the way of her professional goals. As a young student, she was barred from attending prestigious all-boys schools, so she pursued her love of mathematics at the best institutions she could find that were open to girls and women. Following her college graduation, she became one of the first programmers at Sperry, an electronics manufacturer in New York, despite having virtually no prior experience with computers.
In 1959, after learning to code on the job just a few years prior, Sammet helped write the foundation of Cobol, a programming language widely used in computers that performed large-scale data processing jobs. Later, as a programming manager at IBM in 1971, she helped develop Formac, the first commonly used computer language for symbolic manipulation of mathematical formulas.
She was honored in 2009 with an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award for “pioneering work and lifetime achievement as one of the first developers and researchers in programming languages.” Her career and contributions were chronicled in an oral history with the IEEE History Center.
An early love of numbers
Born and raised in New York City, Sammet developed an early interest in mathematics. Her gender precluded her from attending prominent New York math- and science-focused schools such as the Bronx High School of Science, according to a biography published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. She attended Julia Richman High School, an all-girls facility, and took every math class it offered.
Sammet knew she wanted to major in math in college. In a 2001 interview with the IEEE History Center, she said, “I looked at all the catalogs from all the girls’ schools and decided Smith and Mount Holyoke seemed to have the best math courses.”
Sammet was accepted into both colleges but decided on Mount Holyoke, which is in South Hadley, Mass.
“I’m not even sure why I picked Holyoke, but I am very thankful that I did,” she said in the IEEE oral history. “It was a great college. Still is.”
She received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1947 and went on to earn a master’s degree in math in 1949 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
She joined the Illinois faculty as a teaching assistant, then in 1951 moved back to New York City.
Development of Cobol
Sammet joined Sperry in 1953 as an engineer. She initially performed mathematical analysis and ran the company’s analog computer, but two years later, she was tasked with supervising a growing department of computer programmers.
In 1955 Sperry merged with Remington Rand, an early business machine manufacturer in New York City.
That gave Sammet the opportunity to work with computing pioneer Grace Hopper on the UNIVAC I, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer manufactured in the United States.
Sammet left Remington Rand in 1958 to join Sylvania Electric Products, a manufacturer in Needham, Mass. She had applied for an engineering position but was hired as a software developer.
While at Sylvania, Sammet was appointed to the U.S. Department of Defense short-range committee, which included a group of programmers from six computer manufacturers. According to a May 1959 meeting summary, the DOD established the committee to design the specifications of “a common business language” that could work across all computers—one that was “problem-oriented and machine-independent.”
Sammet chaired the statement language subcommittee, which included five other programmers from Sylvania, IBM, and RCA. It was tasked with designing the foundation of Cobol.
According to the History Center interview, the subcommittee completed most of its tasks during a two-week sprint, working around the clock while holed up at the Sherry-Netherland hotel in New York City. The subcommittee presented its proposal for the code in November 1959, and Sylvania and the DOD accepted it with minimal changes.
The language, structurally similar to English, was partially based on Hopper’s FLOW-MATIC programming language. During a time when computers were running extremely complex code, Cobol allowed early mainframe computers to essentially speak the same language, eliminating the need to manually program the same data-processing applications into every new machine.
Leadership at IBM and ACM
After two years at Sylvania, Sammet left in 1961 to join IBM in Cambridge, Mass., where she managed computer language development within the company’s data systems division. There she led the team that developed Formac, a formula manipulation compiler. It was the first computer algebra system to have significant commercial use.
After the system’s release in 1964, she continued researching modeling programming and mathematical languages. In 1969 she had Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals published. The book covered the 120 languages in existence at the time.
From 1968 to 1974, Sammet served as programming technology planning manager for IBM’s federal systems division, which conducted defense-related research and systems integration applications for the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Postal Service. She also led the company’s work on the Ada programming language.
She became active in the Association for Computing Machinery in 1961 while working on Formac. In an ACM interview, she said she joined so she could network with professionals working in her field at Bell Labs, Carnegie Mellon, and other institutions. She explained that such opportunities virtually didn’t exist at the time outside of ACM and other professional associations.
She chaired the special interest committee on symbolic and algebraic manipulation (now known as SIGSAM). She also served on a number of councils and planning committees.
She was elected vice president of ACM in 1972 and became its first female president in 1974.
Among the accolades she received for her accomplishments were the 1989 Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing and an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke in 1978.
Sammet died in May 2017 at age 89. A longtime supporter of Mount Holyoke, she endowed a professorship there: the Sammet professor of computer science.
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