Margaret Hamilton

Also known as Margaret Heafield Hamilton, Margaret Heafield, Margaret Elaine Hamilton, Margaret Elaine Heafield

American NASA scientist and mathematician

OverviewAI-generated

Margaret Elaine Hamilton is an American computer scientist, mathematician, engineer, and businessperson. Born in Paoli in 1936, she was educated at Earlham College and the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Her professional career includes employment with NASA, the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specifically its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Hamilton has received several honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Washington Award, and induction into the National Aviation Hall of Fame. She is recognized in the Presidential Medal of Freedom collection. In addition to her work in computer science, she is an author with eighteen works, including *Six Scattered Stories*, *Airy Fairy Lilian*, *B Is for Bedtime*, *Complexity Theory for Social Work Practice*, and *April's Lady*.

Synthesized by Vinony from 19 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, Open Library, Vinony collections. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Works: 18

Top works

Six Scattered Stories
Airy Fairy Lilian
B Is for Bedtime
Complexity Theory for Social Work Practice
April's Lady

via Open Library + Wikidata

Wikidata facts

Instance of: human
Given name: Elaine
Family name: Hamilton
Gender: female
Citizenship: United States
Place of birth: Paoli
Occupation: engineer
Educated at: University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Employer: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Award: National Aviation Hall of Fame
Field of work: computer science
Image: Margaret Hamilton 1995.jpg

Show 6 more facts

date of birth: 1936-08-17
Commons category: Margaret Hamilton (scientist)
birth name: Margaret Hamilton
interested in: computer science
maintained by WikiProject: WikiProject Mathematics
name in native language: Margaret Hamilton

Sources (6)

via Wikidata · CC0

~19 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is 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 has 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."

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Margaret Hamilton” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.