Obituaries

Financial Times reporter Clive Cookson details how the late Margaret Hamilton engineered code that would play a crucial role in achieving the first moon landing, at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab. When Apollo 11’s onboard computer flashed alarms minutes from landing on the moon, “Hamilton and colleagues had engineered the software to dump non-essential background tasks under those circumstances and prioritize procedures needed for the landing,” writes Cookson. “NASA controllers in Houston trusted the software, so they decided not to abort the mission, allowing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to touch down safely in their Eagle module.”  

Writing for Nature, Deputy Editorial Director Maia Weinstock honors the life and legacy of the late Margaret Hamilton, a pioneer of the software engineering field, who, at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab, led the team that wrote and tested software for the Apollo Guidance Computer onboard Apollo 11. Hamilton’s story “was also my inspiration for one of the vignettes in a Lego set that I created in 2016, featuring Hamilton and several other women in NASA history,” writes Weinstock. “She continued work at [her Universal Systems Language company] Hamilton Technologies well into her 80s, never failing to inspire me and countless others with her tenacity, humour, warmth and childlike wonder.”

“Groundbreaking computer scientist” Margaret Hamilton, who at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab “led the team that created the onboard flight software for NASA’s moon-bound Apollo program and later in life was celebrated as a powerful symbol of women in technology,” has died at 90, writes Associated Press reporter Jamie Stengle. Hamilton “was very much a mathematician and into the abstraction of how to turn thought into software,” notes her daughter, Lauren. 

MassLive’s Liesel Nygard spotlights the late Margaret Hamilton, “a pioneering computer scientist who helped establish the field of software engineering and led the MIT team that developed the onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo moon missions.” Nygard writes, “Thanks to priority-driven ‘defensive’ software [in the lunar module’s computers] engineered by Hamilton and her team, the system automatically shut down unnecessary background tasks to focus on the landing, avoiding an emergency abort [of the Apollo 11 mission].”  

The Washington Post’s Juno Carmel details how the late Margaret Hamilton “developed early computer software that helped pave the way for the digital world as we know it today” and led the team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab that programmed the alarm code that played a crucial role in the Apollo 11 mission. Hamilton “was the lead developer for the software that powered the Apollo guidance computer, which weighed 70 pounds but had only 72 kilobytes of memory, a fraction of today’s smartphones,” notes Carmel. 

Margaret Hamilton, “best known for her major contributions to the Apollo missions” at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab, “died on Sept. 30 at age 90, leaving behind a trailblazing legacy of problem-solving and entrepreneurship that paved the way for a new branch of computer science and engineering,” writes reporter Margherita Bassi for Smithsonian Magazine. Hamilton’s “coding foresight and prowess really made that mission a success,” says Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Andrew Meade McGee. “She created the logical software basis for many of the critical systems we use to maintain our infrastructure today, and that silently power today’s modern aerospace world.” 

Margaret Hamilton, who developed the software that helped the Apollo 11 mission land safely on the moon and “whose historic accomplishments focused attention on the work of software engineers,” died on Sept. 30, reports Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe. “She gave me, from the get-go, this notion that I could do anything, that there were absolutely no gender barriers,” says Hamilton’s daughter, Lauren. Hamilton’s life and work conveyed to her great-granddaughters “that very clear idea that they could have whatever future they wanted to create for themselves.” 

For The New York Times, reporters Carolyn Y. Johnson and Kenneth Chang spotlight the late computer scientist Margaret Hamilton and her role in the development of the field of software engineering, highlighting her work as a “trailblazing woman who played a crucial, largely unseen role.” MIT Presidential Advisor Maria Zuber shared: “When you see someone like her who went for it and lived her dream it makes it a little easier for the rest of us to dare to reach for the moon as well.” 

“Groundbreaking researcher,” Margaret Hamilton, “whose code helped land NASA’s Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th-century space race has died,” reports CNN’s Jackie Wattles. “Through her work, Hamilton is also credited as one of the founders of the field of software engineering — a term she coined — by helping to establish it as a professional practice,” writes Wattles.  

The Guardian’s Uwa Ede-Osifo spotlights the life and legacy of the late Margaret Hamilton, “the computer pioneer whose software powered the first moon landing,” at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab. Prior to the Instrumentation Lab, Hamilton worked “on the software that could detect enemy aircraft,” at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory,” writes Ede-Osifo. “When the institute received a Nasa contract to develop the Apollo onboard flight software, she jumped at the opportunity.”  

Margaret Hamilton, “who led the 100-person team [at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab] that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon,” died on Sept. 30, reports Trip Gabriel for The New York Times. “Her skills led to her promotion to director of software engineering on the project, which developed the two 70-pound onboard computers for the Apollo flights: one in the command module, which carried the astronauts from Earth, and the second in the lunar module, which set down on the moon’s surface,” writes Gabriel. 

Joe Romm ‘82, PhD ‘87, “a physicist by training who became one of the most influential voices in the debate over climate change and how to stop it, using his blog to provide deep-dive insights and sharp-elbowed critiques,” died on Sept. 14, reports Clay Risen for The New York Times. “There’s nobody else like Joe Romm,” says Michael Mann, Romm’s colleague at the Penn Center. “There’s nobody else who brought all of these interlocking talents and proclivities together in the way that he did. That gave him such a unique voice, and it’s a voice that we sorely could use today.” 

Timothy Carney ‘66, “a diplomat who relished difficult assignments in war-torn countries and pushed against bureaucratic restrictions,” died on Aug. 10 at age 82, reports The New York Times’ Adam Nossiter. “Tim was very deeply committed everywhere he served,” says his wife, Victoria Butler. “Everywhere we went he got to know the people where we lived. He believed very strongly in soft power versus hard power. He was an old school kind of diplomat.” 

The life and work of the late Nobel laureate Prof. Susumu Tonegawa, founding director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, is spotlighted by The New York Times’ Dylan Loeb McClain. “Few scientists have reshaped our understanding of biology as profoundly,” says Prof. Myriam Heiman, director of the Picower Institute. “His intellectual fearlessness, extraordinary creativity and relentless pursuit of fundamental questions opened entirely new frontiers in both immunology and neuroscience.” 

Donlyn Lyndon, a former MIT professor who also served as head of MIT’s Department of Architecture and was known for his work designing an icon of modern architecture on a bluff in Northern California, has died at age 90, reports Penelope Green for The New York Times.