Margaret Hamilton, Apollo Software Pioneer, Dies at 90

Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who coined the term "software engineering" and led the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program, died on September 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at age 90.

Born in 1936 in Paoli, Indiana, Hamilton earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College in 1958. She joined MIT in 1959, initially working with meteorologist Edward Lorenz on weather prediction software—including programming the LGP-30 computer that helped establish the foundations of chaos theory. In the mid-1960s, she moved to MIT's Instrumentation Lab, which held a NASA contract for the Apollo program. She began on software for uncrewed missions before leading the team developing on-board flight software for crewed Apollo missions. By 1968, she was assistant director in charge of the command and service module software team.

Hamilton's work was critical to the Apollo moon landings. A famous photograph shows her as a young woman standing next to a towering stack of printouts containing the code her team developed. She later founded two software companies and continued to be recognized for her pioneering contributions to the field she helped define.

In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 2017, she was immortalized as a LEGO minifigure in the "Women of NASA" set, alongside astronauts Mae Jemison and Sally Ride. MIT and NASA leadership mourned her passing, with Olivier de Weck, interim head of MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, stating: "To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer—to say she was ahead of her time—would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved."