Margaret Elaine Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton, 1995.

Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner.

She met her first husband, James Cox Hamilton, in the mid-1950s while attending college. They were married on June 15, 1958, the summer after she graduated from Earlham. She briefly taught high school mathematics and French at a public school in Boston, Indiana. The couple then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where they had a daughter, Lauren, born on November 10, 1959. They divorced in 1967.

In 1963 Hamilton started working at MIT, hired by a former mentor, Dan Lickly. Hamilton and Lickly married in 1969.

She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of the flight guidance software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions.

Stack of Code

Since the early 2020s a picture of Hamilton next to a stack of code has circulated widely online. The picture is often accompanied by erroneous captions that claim that this was a single listing of the code used to send men to the Moon and that she wrote the code alone. These claims are false:

• The image does not show a single listing of the code. Many listings were stacked on top of one another to reach her height.
• Hamilton did not write the code alone. At the time of Apollo 8 (21-27 Dec 1968) Hamilton was still sufficiently junior that she was having code changes blocked. By 28 March 1969 Hamilton was Colossus Programming Leader Apollo Guidance and Navigation. Various sources report that she led the team that developed the code. Some commentators claim that even this is an over-statement and that the source code was frozen by the time she was promoted to team lead. Her contributions would then be limited to bug fixes.

Example

Software Engineering

Anthony Oettinger, Barry Boehm and Hamilton have been jointly credited with coining the term software engineering in which software should be seen as an engineering discipline.

Hamilton claims the credit for herself:

When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. Not because of his acceptance of the new 'term' per se, but because we had earned his and the acceptance of the others in the room as being in an engineering field in its own right.

Tribute

In 2019, to celebrate 50 years to the Apollo landing, Google decided to make a tribute to Hamilton. The mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility were configured to create a picture of Hamilton and the Apollo 11 by moonlight.

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