MIT confirmed the death of Margaret Hamilton, who directed the software team for NASA's Apollo flights. She died on 30 September in Massachusetts at 90.
Margaret Hamilton, the mathematician who led the team that wrote the onboard software for NASA's Apollo missions, has died at 90. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirmed her death and said she died on 30 September. The New York Times reported that she died in a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that her daughter, Lauren, confirmed the death.
Hamilton worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s and managed the Software Engineering Division. BBC News reported that she led engineers writing and testing the in-flight software for Apollo 11, the flight that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. The Times said she was the first woman programmer hired onto the Apollo project at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory in 1965 and later directed software engineering for the flight computers.
Those computers, the Times reported, were the two roughly 70-pound machines carried in the command module and the lunar module. Hamilton is widely credited with helping to establish software engineering as a discipline. In 2016 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying she symbolised a generation of women who helped send people into space.
MIT said that calling her a pioneer, or ahead of her time, would be a dramatic understatement, and noted that she was a software engineer before the job was mainstream. She was born in Indiana in 1936, studied mathematics at the University of Michigan and earned a BA in mathematics from Earlham College in 1958, BBC reported.
No public funeral arrangement was included in the BBC or Times accounts used here. The notices treat her death as confirmed by MIT and by her family, not as a new technical finding about the Apollo software.
People Sentiments Negative
- MIT said calling Hamilton a pioneer would be a dramatic understatement.
- Barack Obama said in 2016 that she symbolised unsung women who helped send humankind into space.