“Margaret Heafield Hamilton (née Margaret Elaine Heafield) was born in 1936. She studied mathematics in the 1950s and got her start working on meteorological software at MIT. From there, she transferred to writing software for America's air-defense network. Her first task, given to her as a form of hazing, was to try to fix a program that no one could figure out, let alone make work. Part of the difficulty was that the author made all of his comments for the program in Greek and Latin. Margaret surprised her peers, by not only running the program successfully, but also making it print out its results in the two archaic languages.
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Still at MIT, she joined the engineering team for the Apollo program (America's effort to put a man on the Moon) where she eventually became the head of development for all in-flight software. In her work, she pioneered many important concepts of software writing, perhaps most notably: a program's ability to detect and recover from its own errors.”
