Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led the MIT team that wrote the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program, died on September 30 at the age of 90, MIT News reported. She was best known for heading the software engineering effort at MIT's Instrumentation Lab that helped land humans on the moon.
Hamilton spent over two decades at MIT, from 1959 until the mid-1970s, and authored more than 130 publications. She is widely credited with helping to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline, and her work was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
Leading Apollo's software team
At MIT's Instrumentation Lab, Hamilton led the teams responsible for the Lunar Module and Command and Service Module onboard flight software, overseeing more than 400 people. That software ran on the computers that guided Apollo missions, including the first crewed moon landing.
A now-famous 1969 photograph shows Hamilton standing beside towering stacks of printed Apollo software listings. Her biography notes that she coined the term "software engineering" to describe the rigor she believed building software required, at a time when the field was in its infancy.
A career from weather prediction to entrepreneurship
Born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, Hamilton began studying mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 and earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College in 1958. She moved to Boston in 1959 and soon took a temporary position in MIT's meteorology department, working with professor Edward N. Lorenz on weather prediction software.
That role was her first entry into computer programming, and her work informed Lorenz's later publications on chaos theory. She joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory as a programmer in 1961 before moving to the Instrumentation Lab, and after MIT she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO.
