Meet the American who wrote the moon-landing software: Margaret Hamilton, computer whiz and mom

Computer prodigy Hamilton was just 32 years old when Apollo 11 put men on the moon, guided by her innovative software that saved the mission from being aborted minutes before landing on the lunar surface. The Apollo 11 moon landing was one giant leap for womankind. Credit Margaret Hamilton, a 32-year-old mother and computer whiz at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wrote the software that placed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969. She also worked on the five moon-landing missions that followed. The director of software engineering at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, Hamilton was a pioneer of computer science in a transformative era, and on a transformative mission, in human history.