Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton is an American computer scientist, born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, who directed the Software Engineering Division at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory during the development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer. She is credited with coining the term software engineering itself, arguing that writing software for spacecraft demanded the same rigor and discipline traditionally applied only to hardware engineering. The error-detection and priority-alarm systems her team built into the Apollo 11 lunar module's software proved critical during the 1969 Moon landing, when the guidance computer became overloaded with data just before touchdown and the software correctly prioritized the tasks needed to keep the landing on track rather than crashing outright. She later founded two software companies, Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, and published more than 130 papers, proceedings and reports across roughly sixty projects over her career; in 2016 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor.