Born in New York City in 1928, Jean Sammet was an early American computer scientist. In 1962, she created FORMAC (FORmula MAnipulation Compiler), the first computer programming language that was widely used. From 1955 to 1958, she worked for Sperry Gyroscope where she ran the first group of scientific programmers. She then moved on to Sylvania and became a member of the first COBOL group. It was while working at IBM that she developed FORMAC.

In 1974, Sammet became the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery. She's written multiple books, including Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. She was a recipient of the 1989 Lovelace Award and the 2009 Computer Pioneer Award, given by the IEEE Computer Society.