Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist credited with coining the term software engineering and whose code helped NASA land Apollo 11 on the moon, has died aged 90.
Her daughter Lauren Hamilton confirmed she died on September 30 in a Cambridge, Massachusetts hospital. MIT announced her death Wednesday.
Hamilton led the MIT team that built the onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. In 1969, she was director of the Software Engineering Division at MIT Instrumentation Lab.
The software proved critical during Apollo 11’s descent on July 20, 1969. With the lunar module computer overloaded and flashing alarms, her team’s asynchronous, priority-driven design kept essential navigation running and discarded low-priority tasks. The landing continued.
A native of Indiana, she joined MIT in 1959 after studying Mathematics at Earlham College. At a time when software was not considered a discipline, she fought for rigorous engineering standards.
In 2016, Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying her work symbolized a generation of women in science whose contributions went unrecognized.
She later went on to found two software companies and continued research into systems engineering.
That photo of her next to a huge stack of Apollo listings remains one of computing’s most famous images.
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