Margaret Hamilton, the pioneering computer scientist who led the software engineering team during NASA’s Apollo program, passed away on September 30. She was 90 years old.
Born in Indiana, Hamilton began her college education at the University of Michigan. She ultimately transferred to Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy. In 1959, Hamilton moved to Boston, where she soon found a temporary position in the meteorology department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, beginning her career in computer programming.
In 1961, Hamilton was hired as a programmer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. She worked on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment project, the United States’ first air defense system. Four years later, Hamilton took a new role with MIT’s Instrumentation Lab, which had recently won the contract from NASA to build the onboard flight software for the Apollo program. Hamilton was the first woman hired as programmer for the project. By 1968, Hamilton had become assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module Team. She oversaw a workforce of more than 400 people working on Apollo’s software. Hamilton continued to work for MIT into the late 1970s.
After leaving the university, Hamilton founded her first software company, Higher Order Software, in 1976. Later in her career, she founded Hamilton Technologies “to provide products and services to modernize the planning, system engineering and software development process in order to maximize reliability, lower cost, and accelerate time to market.” Both of these firms emphasized Hamilton’s software engineering approach to error prevention.
“Margaret Hamilton has been an inspiration to generations of computer scientists and engineers. Hers was a career dedicated to preventing errors and what she called ‘handling the unknown,’” said Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim dean of the MIT department of aeronautics and astronautics. “She personified leadership by example, and established a practice of software engineering based on problem-solving and systems engineering that we all benefit from.”