Margaret Hamilton, who led the Apollo onboard software team, dies at 90

16 October 2026

Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who pioneered software engineering and helped put humans on the Moon, has died aged 90.
She was born in 1936 in Paoli, Indiana, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College in 1958.
She helped develop weather-prediction software in the meteorology department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Edward Lorenz, despite having no prior programming experience.
In 1961 she moved to the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to code the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment air-defence system.
She became the first programmer hired for the Apollo project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later led the team that wrote and tested the software for the Apollo Guidance Computer.
She is often credited with coining the term software engineering, and later founded software companies serving the space, defence, energy and communications sectors.