Margaret Hamilton

NASA software pioneer who enabled the first moon landing through innovative programming

Margaret Hamilton (b. 1936) revolutionized software engineering through her work on the Apollo Guidance Computer. As director of the Software Engineering Division at MIT, she led development of priority scheduling and asynchronous software that saved the Apollo 11 mission when computer overload occurred during lunar descent.

Hamilton coined the term "software engineering" and introduced error-checking protocols still used in mission-critical systems. Her team's 145,000 lines of code achieved unprecedented reliability, establishing foundational principles for modern software development. The stack of code printouts she posed beside became an iconic image of technical achievement.