Born in 1936, Margaret Hamilton started out as a math teacher (not unlike Fran Allen), and intended to study abstract mathematics, but instead ended up working for MIT’s meteorology department. There, she developed algorithms to predict the weather and contributed to the chaos theory publications of her employer, Edward Norton Lorenz.
She stayed with MIT, and helped write code for a prototype Air Force computer, a satellite tracker, and the Apollo space mission, in which she was the lead flight software designer. She went on to co-found Higher Order Software in 1976 and founded Hamilton Technologies in 1985.
She is one of three people credited with coining the term “software engineering,” which she legitimized as a respected discipline while working on the Apollo missions.