Pioneers in CS: Margaret Hamilton

Ever heard of Margaret Hamilton? Not many people have, yet without her, Apollo 11 may never have landed on the moon. Margaret was born in 1936 and started out in mathematics at the University of Michigan after graduating from high school in 1954. She received her B.A. in math with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College in Indiana in 1958. She taught math for a while at a high school but eventually moved to Boston, Massachusetts to get her Ph.D. in abstract mathematics. However, in 1960 she was offered a job at the MIT meteorology department to write weather-predicting software. Software engineering hadn’t even been invented yet, so Margaret taught herself how to program and became an early pioneer in the software world.

Margaret moved from developing weather software to developing software for the Lincoln Labs at MIT to look for hostile aircraft. In 1965, she became the director of the Software Engineering Division at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory for the Apollo 11 mission. Margaret was in charge of the navigation and lunar landing guidance software that ended up preventing an abort of the mission.

Three minutes before Apollo 11 was supposed to land, the computer started receiving extra, unnecessary data due to an error. The extra data overloaded the computer and set off alarms but thanks to Margaret and her team’s code, the computer was able to discern the higher-priority task at hand and successfully conduct the landing of the lunar module.

Margaret Hamilton ended up becoming the CEO of two companies, her own, Hamilton Technologies Inc., and one she co-founded, Higher Order Software. She was awarded the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award in 1989, the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003 (very prestigious award), and the Outstanding Alumni Award from Earlham College in 2009. Margaret is best known for her pioneer work in asynchronous programming and human-in-the-loop decision capability. She is also credited with coining the term “software engineering”. Despite the challenges of pioneering a technology and a way of thinking, Margaret Hamilton became one of the greats in CS and the “one giant leap for mankind” was made.