Jean E. Sammet

Early life 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.

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. Sammet was instead hired to oversee software development for the MOBIDIC project by Carl Hammer, the person responsible for Sylvania's software development.

Ties to ACM

Around 1965 or 1966, Sammet noticed a need for the exchange of intellectual information with others working with languages and software while she worked on FORMAC. She was a member of ACM for a number of years but was not active until she became interested in starting a special interest group that would allow her to speak with other professionals in the field. After a couple of failed attempts at contacting the person in charge of Special Interest Groups and Special Interest Committees at ACM, Sammet contacted George Forsythe, president of ACM from 1964 to 1966, who named her Chairperson of the Special Interest Committee on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation.

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. She identified people at Bell Labs, Carnegie Mellon, and IBM who were in different divisions and groups. Sammet faced resistance from the interest group on numerical analysis in ACM. Roughly five years after SICSAM formed, there was a conference about mathematical software called SIGNUM. 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).

Selected works

Detailed Description of COBOL, 1960

Awards 1975: Honorary Member of UPE (the International Honor Society for the Computing and Information Sciences), inducted on October 8, 1975. 1989: Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, the Association for Women in Computing. 1994: Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery 1997: SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award (J.A.N. Lee and Jean E. Sammet) 2001: Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for her contributions to the field of programming languages and its history." 2009: Computer Pioneer Award Recipient (IEEE Computer Society) 2013: NCWIT Pioneer Award