Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton dies at 90

Margaret Hamilton, the MIT computer scientist who led the team that developed NASA’s Apollo flight software and coined the term "software engineering," has died at the age of 90.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced on Wednesday that Hamilton passed away on September 30. During the 1960s, she led the development of onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. While the BBC referred to her 2016 award as the Presidential Medal of Honor, The Guardian and Ars Technica identified the award as the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Hamilton's software was tested minutes before the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969 when an onboard computer alarm was triggered. The Guardian reports that the software was designed to prioritize the highest priority tasks and compensate for hardware-related problems rather than aborting the mission. Former President Barack Obama later remarked that while the astronauts had little time, they "thankfully had Margaret Hamilton."

According to Ars Technica, Hamilton was born in 1936 and taught herself to program while working for MIT mathematician Edward Lorenz. She was the first programmer to join the NASA contract at MIT and the first woman the institute hired for that project. Olivier de Weck of MIT stated that Hamilton was a software engineer at a time when the field was in its infancy and contributed to one of the most complex systems humanity had achieved.

Beyond her technical work, Hamilton was featured as a LEGO minifig in the 2017 "Women of NASA" set. According to MIT, she is survived by her daughter, a son-in-law, two grandsons, and four great-grandchildren.

Background

Hamilton graduated from Earlham College in 1958 with a degree in mathematics and a minor in philosophy. Before working on the Apollo missions, she programmed the LGP-30 computer for weather simulations and wrote software to detect enemy aircraft.