Margaret Hamilton (born 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo space program. In 1986, she founded Hamilton Technologies, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around Universal Systems Language, based on her paradigm of "Development Before the Fact" for systems and software design. Hamilton has published over 130 papers, proceedings and reports about sixty projects and six major programs. She is one of the people credited with coining the term "software engineering". In 2016, she 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 missions.
This picture, taken in 1969, shows Hamilton standing next to listings of the navigation software that she and her team at MIT produced for the Apollo project.Photograph credit: Draper Laboratory; restored by Adam Cuerden