Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

Hello! My name is Margaret Hamilton. I was born on August 17th, 1936. When I was a little girl, I loved asking questions about everything. I would always ask 'why?' and 'how?'. To me, math was like a fun puzzle that I was very good at solving. I didn't know it then, but my love for figuring things out would become very important later in my life and help people do something amazing.

After I finished college, I got a very special job in the 1960s at a place called MIT. I worked with NASA, which is the team that sends astronauts into space! My job was to write instructions for the computers on the Apollo spaceships. These instructions are called software, or code. Back then, this kind of work was so new that it didn't even have a name. So, I gave it one: 'software engineering.' My team and I worked very hard to make sure our code was perfect. We had to be sure it would guide the astronauts safely all the way to the Moon!

The most exciting day of my job was July 20th, 1969. It was the day of the Apollo 11 mission, when astronauts were going to land on the Moon for the first time. Just as they were getting ready to land, the computer's alarm bells started ringing! The computer had too many things to do all at once and was getting overwhelmed. But I had designed the software to be smart. It knew how to choose the most important job. The software ignored the less important tasks and focused only on the most important one: landing the spaceship safely. Because of the code my team and I wrote, the astronauts landed on the Moon without a single problem!

I am so proud that my work helped the first humans walk on the Moon. It was a giant step for everyone. In 2016, I received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is a very special award, for my work. The software I helped create opened up a whole new world of technology that we use every day. Today, software is in everything from our phones to our cars. It all started with asking questions and solving big problems, one line of code at a time.