Overview
- MIT published an obituary on Oct. 7 confirming that Margaret Hamilton died on Sept. 30, 2026, and announced a memorial service in Cambridge for next spring.
- Hamilton led the team that built the onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo missions and designed priority scheduling that shut down nonessential tasks so the Apollo 11 landing could continue after a 1202 computer alarm.
- She helped popularize the term software engineering and pioneered defensive programming methods that anticipate and handle errors to keep systems running under stress.
- After Apollo she published more than 130 papers and founded Higher Order Software and Hamilton Technologies while earning honors including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom and NASA awards.
- Tributes from MIT, NASA and Draper Laboratory note her lasting influence on reliability engineering and on opportunities for women in computing, and her Apollo code and public recognitions continue to shape modern software practice.