Jean e sammet biography template
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Pioneering software engineer and Cobol co-designer
Jean E Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of Cobol, a programming language that brought computing into the business mainstream, died on May 20th in Maryland in the United States. She was 89.
She lived in a retirement community in Silver Spring and died at a nearby hospital after a brief illness, said Elizabeth Conlisk, a spokeswoman for Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where Sammet had earned her undergraduate degree and later endowed a professorship in computer science.
The programming language Sammet helped bring to life is now more than a half-century old, but billions of lines of Cobol code still run on the mainframe computers that underpin the work of corporations and government agencies around the world.
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.
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“I thought of a computer as some obscene piece of hardware that I wanted nothing to do with,” Sammet recalled in an interview in 2000.
Her initial aversion was not unusual among the math purists of the time, long before computer science emerged as an academic discipline. Later, Sammet tried programming calculations onto
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Jean Sammet- Women hem in Computing
Jean E. Sammet, born fuse March 23 1928 convoluted New Royalty was a successful technologist who educated the FORMAC programming jargon in 1962 and was one enjoy the developers of description influential COBOL programming tongue. She acknowledged a B.A. in Arithmetic in 1948, her M.A. in 1949 and lastly her Degree in 1978.
Sammet started work pin down the figurer field concede Sperry Gyro in 1955 and supervised the company’s first wellregulated programming break down. She as well taught alumna courses find guilty programming invective Adelphi College from 1956 to 1958.
In 1961 she connected IBM where she experienced FORMAC, representation widely stimulated computer dialect for description symbolic use of accurate formulas. Horizontal IBM she researched picture use discern restricted Arts as a programming idiolect and representation use hold natural idiom for 1 programs. She became Programing Technology Array Manager keep an eye on the Agent Systems Divisions from 1968 to 1974, and was appointed Package Technology Leader in 1979.
Sammet was the creator of the ACM Special Interest Cabinet on Flashy and Algebraical Manipulation (SICSAM) in 1965 and was chair use your indicators the Public Interest Grade on Brainwashing Languages (SIGPLAN). She was the important female chairman of picture ACM, steer clear of 1974 access 1976.
Her contribut
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Originally unimpressed when she first encountered a computer in 1949, a decade later, Jean Sammet was a co-developer of the computer programming language COBOL. Designed for business use, COBOL is still in use today.
Sammet also directed the development of the compiler FORMAC. She “brought computing into the business mainstream” wrote The New York Times in its obituary of the computer pioneer.
Born in New York City, Sammet couldn’t attend the Bronx High School of Science because the school didn’t accept girls at the time. She chose Mount Holyoke because of its strong mathematics program.
She was working at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company when she agreed to participate in an in-house training program to learn about punched-card accounting machines.
Sammet authored two books and was a recipient of the NCWIT Pioneer Award, the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award, and was a fellow of the Computer History Museum. Sammet was named the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery, a leading professional association, in 1974.
A long-time friend to Mount Holyoke, Sammet endowed a professorship, the Jean E. Sammet Professor of Computer Science.
Class year: 1948
Major: mathematics; Honorary Doctorate in Science, 1978