Margaret Hamilton, NASA's First Software Engineer
Meet Margaret H. Hamilton, the woman who led man to the moon. On July 20th, 1969, minutes before Apollo 11's scheduled touch-down, there was a computer error that would have changed history—until Hamilton stepped in. Hamilton’s programming overrode the glitch and ultimately made ""one small step for man, and a giant leap for mankind"" a reality.
A self-taught programmer who rose to the top of the software engineering division at MIT, Hamilton developed the building blocks for (and even coined the term) software engineering.
On November 22, 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Margaret Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, for her invaluable contributions to modern technology and science as we know it.
