Overview
- MIT confirmed late Thursday that Margaret Hamilton died on September 30, 2026, and the institute publicly announced her passing on October 8, 2026; no cause of death has been disclosed.
- Hamilton led the MIT team that developed the Apollo onboard software beginning in 1968, guiding a group of developers to build the mission’s flight code.
- Her program could watch its own processes and prioritize critical tasks, behavior that allowed the Apollo 11 computer to reject nonessential work when a 1202 overload error occurred and still complete the landing.
- She helped define and promote the term software engineering, published more than 130 technical papers, founded software firms after leaving MIT, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
- NASA leaders and MIT colleagues have praised her as a pioneer whose work shifted public and engineering views of software and who helped make reliable, safety‑critical code a central part of modern engineering practice.