Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Heafield Hamilton was born on August 17 1936 in Paoli, Indiana.  After receiving her undergraduate degree in mathematics, she married and taught math and French in public school while her husband completed college.

After the couple moved to Boston, Hamilton planed to enroll in graduate school, but obtained a job at MIT as a programmer for a professor doing meteorological prediction and statistical long-range weather forecasting.

Hamilton worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 to do programming for another metrological professor. She wrote the computer code for the moon-bound spacecraft. In her study of software developed for these missions,

Hamilton tracked a variety of causes of software error – most notably interface errors. Hamilton popularized the term ‘software engineering’ and developed several aspects of today’s computing machines, such as the concept of asynchronous software, priority scheduling or end-to-end testing.
Margaret Hamilton