Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton (1936 to 2026) was an American computer scientist who led the development of the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer. Born Margaret Heafield in Paoli, Indiana, she earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy at Earlham College in 1958. From 1959 she worked for the meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing software for weather prediction, and she later directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory for the Apollo program. She coined the term software engineering, published more than 130 papers, proceedings and reports, and founded the software companies Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2016 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work on the Apollo flight software.