Margaret Elaine Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton (née Heafield; August 17, 1936 – September 30, 2026) was an American computer scientist.

She directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led the development of the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo program. She later founded two software companies, Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hamilton published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She coined the term "software engineering", stating, "I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process."

On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo moon missions.

Early life and education

Margaret Heafield was born August 17, 1936, in Paoli, Indiana, to Kenneth Heafield and Ruth Esther Heafield (née Partington). The family later moved to Michigan, where Margaret graduated from Hancock High School in 1954.

She studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before transferring to Earlham College in Indiana, where her mother had been a student. She earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy in 1958. She cited Florence Long, the head of the math department at Earlham, as helping with her desire to pursue abstract mathematics and become a mathematics professor. She said her poet father and headmaster grandfather inspired her to include a minor in philosophy in her studies.

Personal life and death

Hamilton had a sister, Kathryn Heafield.

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 and Margaret married Dan Lickly two years later. Margaret and Dan Lickly divorced in the early 1970s.

Hamilton died at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 30, 2026, at the age of 90.