Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton is an American computer scientist who directed the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory during the Apollo program, leading development of the onboard flight software for the Apollo Guidance Computer that flew every Apollo mission to the moon. She originated the term software engineering itself, coining it to establish software development as a rigorous engineering discipline in its own right rather than treating it as an informal adjunct to hardware design. In 2016 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work on the Apollo software.