What did Margaret Hamilton do in 1950?

The roots of this iconography reach down into the remarkable history of Hamilton's engagement with software starting in the 1950s. Her first exposure to programming came at MIT, where she programmed meteorological simulations for Professor Edward Lorenz , one of the foremost figures in the development of chaos theory.

Where did Margaret Hamilton go to college?

Margaret H. Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, and studied mathematics at the University of Michigan and Earlham College . She graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1958 and planned to pursue graduate work at Brandeis University.

Who inspired Margaret Hamilton?

She cites a female math professor as helping her desire to pursue abstract mathematics. She had other inspirations outside the technological world, including her father, the philosopher and poet, and her grandfather, a school headmaster and Quaker Minister .

What roles did Margaret Hamilton play?

Hamilton played two credited roles in the famous film: Almira Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West . Hamilton also appears as an unidentified flying witch during the tornado scene, which may have been the Wicked Witch of the West or her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East.

What happened to Margaret Hamilton?

In her later years, Hamilton appeared several times at the Play House. She continued to teach Sunday school and volunteer in various causes. Hamilton divorced her husband in 1938; they had a son, Hamilton Wadsworth Meserve. She died in Salisbury, Connecticut, and her ashes were scattered in Amenia, New York .

How old was Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz?

But she seared a fearsome image on the public consciousness in 1939 when, at the age of 36 , she played the Wicked Witch, the terror of Judy Garland's long dream in the classic film of L. Frank Baum's story.

The Apollo 11 moon landing nearly ended in failure -- until Margaret Hamilton's flight software saved the day. In this iconic photograph, pioneering computer scientist Margaret Hamilton stands next to the computer code that she and her team wrote to guide the Apollo spacecraft to the moon!

Does Margaret Hamilton have a Phd?

On 22 November 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, delivered by US president Barack Obama, for the development of the Apollo missions software. She was awarded the honorary doctoral degree in recognition of her pioneering use of the term "software engineering", 50 years ago.

Where did Hamilton go to school as a kid?

In 1772, impressed by Hamilton's quick learning abilities and intelligence, Hamilton's boss sponsored the young clerk's trip to the United States to attend school there. Hamilton began his preparation for college at a grammar school in New Jersey and enrolled in King's College in 1774.

Where is Margaret Hamilton buried?

Born in Cleveland in 1902, Hamilton spent her final years living in Millbrook in Dutchess County, near her grown son and only child, Hamilton Meserve, then owner of the Taconic Newspapers. Her body was cremated at the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery and her ashes scattered over her property in Amenia.

Who was the woman stack of code for NASA?

There is a famous photo that shows Hamilton in 1969 at MIT, standing next to a stack of Apollo code books as tall as she was (first image).

Margaret Hamilton | Biography & Facts (2024)

American computer scientist

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Margaret Hamilton

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Category:

Née:: Margaret Heafield

Born:: August 17, 1936, Paoli, Indiana, U.S. (age 87)

Founder:: Hamilton Technologies

Awards And Honors:: Presidential Medal of Freedom (2016)

Subjects Of Study:: computer program; software; software engineering

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Margaret Hamilton (born August 17, 1936, Paoli, Indiana, U.S.) American computer scientist who was one of the first computer software programmers; she created the term software engineer to describe her work. She helped write the computer code for the command and lunar modules used on the Apollo missions to the Moon in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

While studying mathematics and philosophy at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, she met James Hamilton, and they subsequently married. After graduating in 1958, she taught high-school mathematics for a short time. The couple then moved to Boston. Although Margaret planned to study abstract mathematics at Brandeis University, she accepted a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) while her husband attended Harvard Law School. At MIT she began programming software to predict the weather and did postgraduate work in meteorology.

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In the early 1960s Hamilton joined MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, where she was involved in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project, the first U.S. air defense system. She notably wrote software for a program to identify enemy aircraft. Hamilton next worked at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory (now the independent Charles Stark Draper Laboratory), which provided aeronautical technology for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She led a team that was tasked with developing the software for the guidance and control systems of the in-flight command and lunar modules of the Apollo missions. At the time, no schools taught software engineering, so the team members had to work out any problems on their own. She coined the term software engineer because she felt that the work she and her team were doing was just as important and just as much engineering as the other work on the Apollo spacecraft. Hamilton herself specifically concentrated on software to detect system errors and to recover information in a computer crash. Both those elements were crucial during the Apollo 11 mission (1969), which took astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon.

Hamilton left MIT in the mid-1970s to work in the private sector. She cofounded the company Higher Order Software in 1976 and established Hamilton Technologies 10 years later.

Hamilton was the recipient of various honours, including NASA’s Exceptional Space Act Award (2003). Pres. Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Erik Gregersen.

Margaret Hamilton | Biography & Facts (2024)

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