Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist who led the team that wrote the on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo program at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. She was head of the laboratory’s Software Engineering Division, responsible for the in-flight software in the Apollo command modules and lunar modules.
Hamilton is credited with championing the term “software engineering.” She has explained that she began using the phrase to distinguish software work from hardware and other kinds of engineering, while still treating each as part of the overall systems engineering process. MIT has described her as a true software engineering pioneer.
Her team’s work proved critical during the Apollo 11 landing in 1969. As the lunar module descended, the guidance computer raised alarms because it was overloaded, and the software was designed to shed lower-priority tasks and keep the essential landing functions running. This priority-driven design let the crew continue to a safe landing rather than abort.
In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The White House citation noted that she led the team that created the on-board flight software for the Apollo command and lunar modules, and credited her with contributions to asynchronous software, priority scheduling, and human-in-the-loop decision making that helped set the foundation for modern, reliable software design.