Born: 17 August 1936, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Margaret Heafield
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield) is an accomplished American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was the director of MIT Instrumentation Laboratory’s Software Engineering Division, a crucial role in developing onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. She also founded two software companies: Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hamilton’s contributions include 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, spanning about sixty projects and six major programs. She coined the term “software engineering” to distinguish it from hardware and other types of engineering while integrating it into the broader systems engineering framework.
Notably, on November 22, 2016, Margaret Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama for her pivotal work in developing onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions.
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