Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton led the team at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory that wrote the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program. Her group developed the code for the Apollo Guidance Computer, including the priority scheduling and error detection routines that let the Lunar Module computer shed low-priority tasks during the Apollo 11 landing instead of failing outright. She is widely credited with popularizing the term software engineering, arguing that building reliable software deserved the same discipline as any other branch of engineering. After Apollo she founded Higher Order Software and later Hamilton Technologies, where she worked on formal methods for designing systems that prevent errors rather than catching them after the fact. In 2016 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contributions to the space program and to the field of computer science.

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