Jean E. Sammet

Jean E. Sammet was born on March 23, 1928, in New York City. Jean and her sister, Helen, were born to Harry and Ruth Sammet who were both lawyers. Jean and Helen attended public elementary schools in Manhattan. Sammet had a strong interest in mathematics but was unable to attend the Bronx High School of Science because it did not accept girls. Instead, Sammet attended Julia Richman High School.

Sammet chose to enroll at Mount Holyoke College based on the strength of its mathematics program. Sammet majored in mathematics and took education courses, which allowed her to be certified to teach high school mathematics in New York. She minored in political science. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, Sammet pursued graduate studies at the University of Illinois, where she received her MA in 1949. While taking courses toward a Ph.D., she was a teaching assistant in the Mathematics department at the University of Illinois from 1948 to 1951. When Sammet first encountered a computer, in 1949 at the University of Illinois, she was not impressed, considering it an obscene piece of hardware.

In 1951, Sammet began looking for a position in education. Sammet was forced to search for positions in New Jersey because New York City was not hiring new teachers. The authorities in New Jersey determined that Sammet was missing two courses from her studies: a course in education and one in the history of New Jersey. Sammet fought this determination, stating that her knowledge of New Jersey history did not strengthen her ability to teach mathematics in high school. This forced Sammet to seek other types of employment.

In 1951, Sammet took a position at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as a trainee actuary. She agreed to participate in an in-house training program to learn about punched card accounting machines. Sammet took to the electronic accounting machines, but was unable to work with the machines after her training was complete. She left her position at the insurance office and enrolled at Columbia University to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics. 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.

From 1953 to 1958, Sammet was a mathematician for Sperry Gyroscope in New York. She spent time working on mathematical analysis problems for clients and ran an analog computer. Sammet worked on the Department of the Navy's submarine program during her time there. In early January 1955, Sammet began her life as a programmer. Sperry Gyroscope was working on a digital computer, the Sperry Electronic Digital Automatic Computer (SPEEDAC) and asked Sammet to be their programmer. 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.

Sammet became the group leader of what was called an “open shop” as Sperry began hiring more programmers. The “open shop” consisted of programmers acting as consultants to the engineers and involved scientists who assisted them in writing and testing their routines. The group produced other system software and focused on scientific and engineering computations. In 1955 Sperry Gyroscope and Remington Rand merged and became Sperry Rand. This brought Sammet into contact with the UNIVAC I computer and Grace Hopper.

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.

Sammet decided to leave Sperry to work for a company with computers as its focal point. 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. Sammet was instead hired to oversee software development for the MOBIDIC project by Carl Hammer, the person responsible for Sylvania's software development.

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.

Sammet published Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals in 1969. The book gives an overview of 120 programming languages being used in the United States as of the late 1960s.

In 1982, Sammet was Ben Shneiderman's supervisor on a year-long sabbatical to work at the IBM Federal Systems Division in Bethesda, MD.