Margaret Hamilton was the computer scientist who led the team that wrote and tested the software for the Apollo Guidance Computer, the onboard computer that helped land the first humans on the Moon. Her reliable, error-tolerant code is credited with helping to save the Apollo 11 landing, and she is often credited with coining the term “software engineering.”
Born Margaret Heafield in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, she earned a mathematics degree from Earlham College, wrote weather-prediction software with chaos theorist Edward Lorenz at MIT, and coded for the SAGE air-defense system before becoming the first programmer hired for MIT’s Apollo project. She later founded her own software companies. A Nature obituary published on October 15, 2026, reported that she has died at age 90.
Image: Margaret Hamilton beside listings of the Apollo software she and her MIT team produced, Draper Laboratory photo restored by Adam Cuerden, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.