About Margaret

Quick Facts
Full Name: Margaret Elaine Heafield Hamilton
Born: Paoli, Indiana - August 17th, 1936
Best Known For: Helping to write the code for the Apollo missions to the Moon

Margaret Hamilton graduated from school in 1954 before becoming a mathematics teacher at high schools. A short while after, herself and her husband moved to Boston where she accepted a job at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here she started programming software to predict the weather and did post graduate work in meteorology.

Hamilton has also worked at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and was involved in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), an early-warning radar system built to detect incoming aircraft. She is known for writing the first automated program to identify enemy aircraft. In addition to this she worked at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory where she led a team who developed the software for guidance and control systems of the in-flight command and lunar modules of the Apollo missions. Here she invented the term ‘software engineer’ as she felt the work of herself and her team was equally important to that of the other Apollo engineers. Hamilton also worked on software to detect system errors and recover information when the system crashed, which was crucial in the Apollo missions.

Hamilton’s advice for young women in STEM is: “Don’t let fear get in the way and don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand” – no question is a dumb question. And don’t always listen to the so-called experts!”

Over the years Hamilton has published over 130 papers and reports. She has also won many awards including the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award in 1986 and The Washington Award. Margaret Hamilton’s legacy will continue to make an impact on the engineering world as she paved the way for a now trillion-dollar industry of software engineering.