What you didn't learn in High School: Margaret Hamilton

You've probably never heard of a woman named Margaret Hamilton, graduate of the University of Michigan and Earlham College, the publisher of over 130 scientific papers, a renowned computer scientist, and not to mention the reason that man ever reached the moon. Her erasure from the scientific community is incredible considering her impact upon such a historic event. Hamilton began working on the code for Apollo 11 in 1965, but it wasn't until 2003 that NASA publicly recognized her groundbreaking work with the Exceptional Space Act Award. So, what makes her code so special? How did she single-handedly invent modern software?

It all started in the 1960's when she interned for MIT developing weather software and later in the decade when she worked on the SAGE project, which is a device that can predict weather and was used in the English air force. Hamilton was the first scientist to get the SAGE to work, and it is because of this that she became the lead developer for NASA's software.

After her work at NASA in the 60's and on the Apollo modules in the 70's, Hamilton founded her own company, Hamilton Technologies Inc. which is located in Boston, MA. At a time when computer engineering courses were few and far between, and when women were seldom allowed in the lab, Margaret Hamilton worked tirelessly on pioneering what we call software engineering. Hers is a name we should all know.