Yes, girls can do math. And much, much more...

Computing in the twentieth century was dominated by men. Engineers, programmers, and managers were almost entirely male. In the 1970s and 80s, it was not at all unusual to attend a technical training class on operating systems or networking and find oneself in the company of only male students. One could attend a professional conference with thousands of other attendees and see only a paltry handful of women.

These were tough times for women in the computing field.

But one woman stood out.

Jean Sammet, born in 1928 in New York City, had strong math skills. But according to Wikipedia, she was “unable to attend the Bronx High School of Science because it did not accept girls.”

Instead, attending a private high school, she excelled in her math ability and moved on to earn  bachelor’s and master’s degrees by 1949. The first computer she encountered did not impress her. According to reports, she found it to be an obscene beast.

But by the mid-1950s, working for Sperry Gyroscope, she was engaged to use her math and logic skills to program a computer and found that she loved the process.

In those early days, computers demanded that we communicate with them in their own language. Machine language was expressed in binary commands, ones and zeros, sometime grouped into base 16, hexadecimal, where the digits 0-9 and letters A-F expressed binary groupings from 0000 to 1111 (figure 1a). The details are unimportant. What matters is that programs consisting of binary commands and operators and operands were obtuse and difficult to be understood by humans.

Ms. Sammet had an affinity for computer languages and a desire to make them more easy to use. This predilection of hers corresponded with an expanded use of computers from largely engineering and mathematical computation to general business applications – payroll, accounts receivable, tax collection, and the like. She became influential in a group which proposed and designed a new language, COBOL, the Common Business Oriented Language. This language was intended to express computer directions in terms of simple English statements (figure 1b).

The US government, at the time the largest user of computers, supported the project and COBOL was born. Others, such as Admiral Grace Hopper, are often given credit for the birth of the COBOL language. And while never diminishing Admiral Hopper’s support, Ms. Sammet rightfully claimed the central role of designing and actually writing the compiler programs which converted English-like COBOL programs into machine language. (After all, the actual computers, at root, still understood only machine language, a fact which remains true to this day).

Now, nearly sixty years later, billions of lines of COBOL programs still enervate the computers of government and big business. Considered a legacy language, meaning new development is utilizing more modern languages (figure 1c), COBOL is still an active agent in processing your credit card charges, insurance claims, and ATM withdrawals.

In the years that followed, Ms. Sammet roared along in her gender-busting career. In the 1960s, she joined IBM and became a programming language technology manager in the IBM Systems Development Division. She authored a seminal book, “Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals,” which was published by Prentice-Hall and has been described by others as "the standard work on programming languages" and an "instant computer classic." (IEEE Computer Society history).

Her career continued to ascend and by the late 1970s she was elected president of the prestigious Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Recall that this was a time when women were exceedingly rare in computing. Her successes were astounding and due only to her deep skills and resilient character.

Jean Sammet passed away a few weeks ago on May 20, 2017, at the age of 89. Unremarked and unmourned except by a small society of geeks, she had made her resounding point.

Girls hold no second candle to anyone when it comes to STEM, math, logic, and programming. She was a giant and, unbeknownst to you, bettered your life. God bless you, Jean, and thank you for your work.