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.

Computer pioneer Margaret Hamilton was critical to landing astronauts on the moon for the first time on 20 July 1969 and returning them safely a few days later. The young Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer programmer and working mother led the team that created the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions, including Apollo 11. The computer system was the most sophisticated of its day. Her rigorous approach was so successful that no software bugs were ever known to have occurred during any crewed Apollo missions. "She symbolises that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space," said President Barack Obama in 2016 when he awarded Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, is usually associated with famous awardees--people like Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Hawking, and Sandra Day O'Connor. So as a computer scientist, I was thrilled to see one of this year's awards go to a lesser-known pioneer: one Margaret Hamilton. You might call Hamilton the founding mother of software engineering. In fact, she coined the very term. She concluded that the way forward was rigorously specified design, an approach that still underpins many modern software engineering techniques--"design by contract" and "statically typed" programming languages, for example.