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Person

Margaret Hamilton

A woman in an orange cardigan stands beside a stack of books, wearing glasses and a pearl necklace, with a dark background.

American computer scientist, born 1936, who led the on-board flight software team for Apollo at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. She coined the term software engineering, designed the priority-scheduled executive that kept the lunar module flying through the 1202 alarms, and was photographed in 1969 standing beside a stack of her team's printed code that was taller than she was. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

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