Margaret Hamilton, a groundbreaking computer scientist who led the team that created onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo moon-bound program and who later in life was celebrated as a powerful symbol of women in technology, has died. She was 90 years old.
Hamilton died Sept. 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her daughter, Lauren Hamilton, told The Associated Press on Thursday. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on the social platform X that his work helped make humanity’s first trips to the Moon possible.
“To say that Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer — to say that she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement,” Olivier de Weck, an Apollo program professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and interim head of its aeronautics and astronautics department, told MIT News, a publication of the university’s communications office.
“She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy,” de Weck continued, “and she not only developed advanced code herself, but also led a team using this nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity has ever made.”
In recent years, a photo has circulated online showing a smiling Hamilton, in her early 30s, standing next to a towering stack of pages containing the codes used by her team during Project Apollo. A Lego set celebrating the women of NASA unveiled in 2017 included a Hamilton minifigure. And the 2019 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing also attracted attention, his daughter said.
“She definitely went from no one knowing who she was to suddenly everyone knowing who she was, especially in her field,” Lauren Hamilton said. “And I think she was really happy to be recognized for what she did. But she was kind of a private person so being in the spotlight wasn’t necessarily a natural thing for her.”
Hamilton earned a degree in mathematics from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, in 1958 and went to work for MIT in 1959. At first, she focused on working with a meteorology professor on weather forecasting software, according to the MIT News article. In the mid-1960s, she started at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which had a contract with NASA for Apollo.
After first working on software for uncrewed missions, she then led the team developing onboard flight software for crewed missions, and by 1968 she was deputy director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, according to MIT News.
“We took our work seriously, and many of us started this journey while we were still in our 20s,” Hamilton told MIT News in 2009. “Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure.”
“Because the software was a mystery, a black box, senior management gave us complete freedom and trust,” she continued. “We had to find a way, and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; we had no choice but to be pioneers.”
She worked at the Instrumentation Lab in the 1970s, then founded two software companies, according to MIT News.
Lauren Hamilton said her mother’s greatest interest was the abstract. “She was really a mathematician and was interested in the abstraction of how to turn thought into software, I guess,” she said.
She said her mother was also “a really quirky, fun character” who loved collecting vintage clothes and had “a very mischievous sense of humor.”
“She faced a lot of sexism in her field, but she didn’t come back aggressively,” Lauren Hamilton said. “She disarmed people with her sense of humor or… quite simply, she quietly dominated them.”
Born Aug. 17, 1936, in Indiana, Hamilton grew up primarily in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, her daughter said, and she lived in Cambridge from age 20 until her death.
Hamilton has received numerous awards and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2016 by President Barack Obama.
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