margaret hamilton scientist for other people named margaret hamilton see margaret hamilton disambiguation margaret heafield hamilton born on august 17 1936 hamilton has published over 130 papers proceedings and reports about the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved on november 22 2016 she was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by us president barack obama for her work leading the development of onboard flight software for nasas apollo moon missions early life margaret heafield was born in paoli indiana to kenneth heafield and ruth esther heafield ne partington sage project from 1961 to 1963 she worked on the semiautomatic ground environment sage project at lincoln lab where she was one of the programmers who wrote software for the first anfsq7 computer the xd1 to search for unfriendly aircraft she also wrote software for the air force cambridge research laboratories the sage project was an extension of project whirlwind started by mit to create a computer system that could predict weather systems and track their movements through simulators sage was soon developed for military use in antiaircraft air defense from potential soviet attacks during the cold war hamilton said what they used to do when you came into this organization as a beginner was to assign you this program which nobody was able to ever figure out or get to run when i was the beginner they gave it to me as well and what had happened was it was tricky programming and the person who wrote it took delight in the fact that all of his comments were in greek and latin so i was assigned this program and i actually got it to work it even printed out its answers in latin and greek i was the first one to get it to work it was her efforts on this project that made her a candidate for the position at nasa as the lead developer for apollo flight software nasa hamilton in 1969 standing next to listings of the software she and her mit team produced for the apollo project hamilton then joined the charles stark draper laboratory at mit which at the time was working on the apollo space mission she eventually led a team credited with developing the software for apollo and skylab her areas of expertise include systems design and software development enterprise and process modelling development paradigm formal systems modeling languages systemoriented objects for systems modelling and development automated lifecycle environments methods for maximizing software reliability and reuse domain analysis correctness by builtin language properties openarchitecture techniques for robust systems full lifecycle automation quality assurance seamless integration error detection and recovery techniques manmachine interface systems operating systems endtoend testing techniques and lifecycle management techniques apollo 11 in one of the critical moments of the apollo 11 mission the apollo guidance computer together with the onboard flight software averted an abort of the landing on the moon three minutes before the lunar lander reached the moons surface several computer alarms were triggered the computer was overloaded with interrupts caused by incorrectly phased power supplied to the landers rendezvous radar was used by hamiltons team to develop asynchronous flight software because of the flight softwares systemsoftwares error detection and recovery techniques that included its systemwide kill and recompute from a safe place restart approach to its snapshot and rollback techniques the display interface routines aka the priority displays together with its manintheloop capabilities were able to be created in order to have the capability to interrupt the astronauts normal mission displays with priority displays of critical alarms in case of an emergency this depended on our assigning a unique priority to every process in the software in order to ensure that all of its events would take place in the correct order and at the right time relative to everything else that was going on hamiltons priority alarm displays interrupted the astronauts normal displays to warn them that there was an emergency giving the astronauts a gono go decision to land or not to land hamilton wrote of the incident the computer or rather the software in it was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing it then sent out an alarm which meant to the astronaut im overloaded with more tasks than i should be doing at this time and im going to keep only the more important tasks ie the ones needed for landing actually the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions a complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software the softwares action in this case was to eliminate lower priority tasks and reestablish the more important ones if the computer hadnt recognized this problem and taken recovery action i doubt if apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was letter from margaret h hamilton director of apollo flight computer programming mit draper laboratory cambridge massachusetts titled computer got loaded published in datamation march 1 1971 businesses from 1976 through 1984 hamilton was the ceo of a company she cofounded called higher order software hos to further develop ideas about error prevention and fault tolerance emerging from her experience at mit one critical assessment contended that apart from a few independent reviews the hos methodology generated little analysis except among consultants associated with the company referring to dijkstras classic work on structured programming harel states as will become clear the layers in which the program is arranged these being in the heart of the idea of structured programming correspond to the levels of the tree harel goes on to show at that time how hos and his derived andor programming language relates to mathematical logic game theory and artificial intelligence others have used hos to formalize the semantics of linguistic quantifiers hamilton left the company hos in 1985 in march 1986 she became the founder and ceo of hamilton technologies inc in cambridge massachusetts the company was developed around the universal systems language usl and its associated automated environment the 001 tool suite based on her paradigm of development before the fact dbtf for systems design and software development legacy official photo for nasa 1989 margaret h hamilton is the person who came up with the idea of naming the discipline software engineering as a way of giving it legitimacy according to hamilton during this time at mit she wanted to give their software legitimacy just like with other engineering disciplines so that it and those building it would be given its due respect and as a result she made up the term software engineering to distinguish it from other kinds of engineering hamilton details how she came about to make up the term software engineering when i first came up with the term no one had heard of it before at least in our world it was an ongoing joke for a long time they liked to kid me about my radical ideas it was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline just like with hardware not because of his acceptance of the new term per se but because we had earned his and the acceptance of the others in the room as being in an engineering field in its own right when hamilton started using the term software engineering at mit she assisted in the creation of the core principles in computer programming as she worked with her colleagues in writing code for the worlds first portable computer awards recognition in 1986 she received the augusta ada lovelace award by the association for women in computing in 2003 she was given the nasa exceptional space act award for scientific and technical contributions the award included 37200 the largest amount awarded to any individual in nasas history in 2009 she received the outstanding alumni award by earlham college in 2016 she received the presidential medal of freedom from barack obama the highest civilian honor in the united states on april 28 2017 she received the computer history museum fellow award that honors exceptional men and women whose ideas have changed the world in 2017 a women of nasa lego set went on sale featuring among other things minifigurines of hamilton mae jemison sally ride and nancy grace roman honoris causa ceremony of margaret hamilton in 2018 she was invested honoris causa by the polytechnic university of catalonia personal life margaret met her husband james cox hamilton while at earlham college they married in the late 1950s after hamilton earned her bachelors degree they have a daughter lauren as well as two grandchildren according to her daughter margaret was the homecoming queen at earlham college and james was the class president publications m hamilton 1994 inside development before the fact cover story special editorial supplement 8es24es electronic design apr 1994 m hamilton 1994 001 a full life cycle systems engineering and software development environment cover story special editorial supplement 22es30es electronic design jun 1994 m hamilton hackler w r 2004 deeply integrated guidance navigation unit dignu common software architecture principles revised dec 29 2004 daaae3002d1020 and daab0798dh5020180 picatinny arsenal nj 20032004 m hamilton and w r hackler 2007 universal systems language for preventative systems engineering proc 5th ann conf systems eng res cser stevens institute of technology mar 2007 paper 36 m hamilton and w r hackler 2007 a formal universal systems semantics for sysml 17th annual international symposium incose 2007 san diego ca jun 2007 m hamilton and w r hackler 2008 universal systems language lessons learned from apollo ieee computer dec 2008 list of pioneers in computer science mcmillan robert 13 october 2015 her code got humans on the moon and invented software itself wired retrieved 20 october 2015 mit news margaret hamilton video produced by makers women who make america vtetimelines of computingcomputing before 1950 19501979 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s softwareopensource software 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s programming languages hypertext technology operating systems dos family windows linux virtualization development malware computer science artificial intelligence quantum computing internet web browsers internet conflicts men in computing charles babbage john backus george boole vint cerf john cocke stephen cook j presper eckert david a huffman bob kahn brian kernighan andrew koenig donald knuth joseph kruskal douglas mcilroy john von neumann dennis ritchie guido van rossum bjarne stroustrup ken thompson linus torvalds alan turing paul vixie larry wall stephen wolfram steve wozniak women in computing kathleen antonelli jean bartik adele goldstine lois haibt betty holberton ada lovelace margaret hamilton grace hopper nancy leveson marlyn meltzer klara dan von neumann frances spence ruth teitelbaum vtesoftware engineeringfields computer programming requirements engineering software deployment software design software maintenance software testing systems analysis formal methods concepts data modeling enterprise architecture functional specification modeling language orthogonality programming paradigm software software archaeology software architecture software configuration management software development methodology software development process software quality software quality assurance software verification and validation structured analysis orientations agile aspectoriented object orientation ontology service orientation sdlc modelsdevelopmental agile eup executable uml incremental model iterative model prototype model rad up scrum spiral model vmodel waterfall model xp other spice cmmi data model er model function model information model metamodeling object model systems model view model languages idef uml usl sysml softwareengineers victor basili kent beck grady booch fred brooks barry boehm peter chen danese cooper ward cunningham tom demarco edsger w dijkstra delores m etter martin fowler adele goldstine margaret hamilton c a r hoare lois haibt mary jean harrold grace hopper watts humphrey michael a jackson ivar jacobson alan kay nancy leveson stephen j mellor bertrand meyer david parnas trygve reenskaug winston w royce james rumbaugh mary shaw peri tarr elaine weyuker niklaus wirth edward yourdon related fields computer science computer engineering project management risk management systems engineering category commons authority control worldcat identities dblp 724181 lccn no2015153151 viaf 117145003297761300086 