Jean E. Sammet was the developer of the programming language known as FORMAC. She worked with Sylvania, an American electrical equipment manufacturer, as a programming research consultant.
She created FORMAC, her best-known brainchild, during her time with IBM. FORMAC was the first popular programming language used for symbolic control of math formulas.
Sammet was also the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery, and was awarded the Ada Lovelace Award for her accomplishments.
She died on May 20, 2017, at age 89.