Somebody mentioned Clojure, which is a great language but has some baggage.

If she's coming from a rigorous background, I highly suggest Scheme and the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/.) For some people using a language with more batteries (and thus instant gratification) is better to learn programming, I think, but for learning to think about computation I think Scheme is pretty hard to beat.

Scientific programming might mean C/C++ (that's where the fast math libs are, to be sure), but it might mean Matlab or Forth or lots of R, who knows.