Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She invented the term “software engineering”, stating “I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process.”
On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions.
Huh, didn’t know about her! She sounds like a badass lady!
People might be more familiar with this viral picture as well, if not the name.
“Margaret Hamilton shown in 1969 standing beside listings of the software developed by her and her team for the Apollo program’s Lunar Module and Command Module.”
Ada Lovelace
For anyone unaware, Ada Lovelace created the first programming language - all before a computer even existed. Absolute Chad of a woman.
The only legitimate child of notorious poet philanderer Lord Byron. I love her whole story.
Margaret Hamilton!
Huh, didn’t know about her! She sounds like a badass lady!
People might be more familiar with this viral picture as well, if not the name.
“Margaret Hamilton shown in 1969 standing beside listings of the software developed by her and her team for the Apollo program’s Lunar Module and Command Module.”
I have her Lego set :)
There’s an awesome Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff podcast episode on Ada Lovelace!