Home Introduction Curiosities Quote

Margaret Hamilton

Introduction

Margaret Hamilton was born on August 17, 1936 in Indiana, United States. She would later become one of the first software programmers in the U.S. and it was she who created the term "software engineer" to describe her work. She helped write the computer code for the command and lunar modules used in the Apollo missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The programmer met her future husband while studying mathematics and philosophy at Earlham College. After graduating in 1958, she taught high school mathematics for a short time. The couple then moved to Boston. Although Margaret intended to study abstract mathematics at Brandeis University, she took a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) while her husband attended Harvard Law School. At MIT she began programming weather forecasting software and majored in meteorology.

Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She is one of the people credited with coining the term "software engineering". On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions.

Curiosities

The software designed for the lunar landing proved so clean and functional that it did not show (bugs) on any of the subsequent Apollo missions, and was later repurposed for use on Skylab, the first U.S. space station, and the Space Shuttle.

Without the scientist's meticulous work, the lunar landing might have ended in a dead end. Minutes before the lander's touchdown, in fact, several alarms went off due to the unexpected (and unnecessary, at the time) activation of the LEM's re-entry radar on the command module. The software developed by Hamilton was able to overlook that error, which risked overloading the onboard computer, compromising the landing, to focus only on the descent and the lunar landing information to be given to the astronauts. Margaret had foreseen the possibility of information overload and conflict during descent, and had developed a program capable of organizing tasks according to priorities, excluding unnecessary ones.

"One must continue even when things seem impossible, even when the so-called experts say it is impossible; you have to be autonomous and they are different; don't be afraid to make mistakes or to admit your mistakes, because only those who fail so much can be so successful."

Margaret Heafield Hamilton