Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist who helped launch the Apollo 11 mission and created the concept of software engineering. Hamilton studied mathematics and philosophy at Earlham College in her home state of Indiana and graduated in 1958. She briefly taught high school math before moving to Boston with her husband James Hamilton. She then took a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There she worked on software that would predict the weather. 

In the mid-1960s Hamilton worked at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, specifically on a team that would create software for the control systems of the command modules and flight modules of the Apollo missions. At the time, there was no program that taught software engineering, so Hamilton and the others in the group had no choice but to pioneer methods and solve problems that solutions didn’t exist for. Hamilton specifically worked on software that would detect system errors and create backups, which proved essential during the 1969 Apollo 11 moon mission. During the mission, the Eagle began to flash a warning message, but due to Margaret Hamilton’s software–and NASA’s trust in it–the astronauts were told to proceed and land the lunar module. When looking back on the 1969 moon landing, Hamilton recalls being more excited about designing the software and seeing it in action than by the mission. 

In the early 1970s, Hamilton left MIT to work as an independent computer scientist in the private sector. She created Universal Systems Language, which helps make developing software more dependable. In 2016, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Barack Obama. Although the field of software development and engineering was mostly male, Margaret Hamilton did not let it stop her from pursuing what she wanted to and innovating in the field.