Margaret Hamilton, the software engineer whose code carried the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90.
Hamilton died on September 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her daughter Lauren Hamilton told the Associated Press. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirmed her death this month.
Hamilton directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led the team that wrote the on-board flight software for the Apollo Guidance Computer. The system steered the command and lunar modules through their missions to the moon. During the Apollo 11 descent, the computer raised program alarms in the final minutes before landing, and her software handled the fault so the mission could continue instead of aborting, according to the ACM’s memorial account.
She is often credited with coining the term “software engineering”, a label she used to give the discipline standing alongside hardware engineering. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 for her contributions to the Apollo programme.
Hamilton was born Margaret Heafield in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936. She studied mathematics at the University of Michigan and Earlham College, and later founded two software companies, Higher Order Software and Hamilton Technologies. She is survived by her daughter Lauren Hamilton.
Source: Nature
