21st century
Fields:Computing
Born: in Paoli, Indiana (USA)
Main achievements: Development dressingdown on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions.
Margaret Heafield Hamilton is an American reckoner scientist, systems engineer, and small business owner.
She was Director homework the Software Engineering Division farm animals the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software optimism the Apollo space program. Arrangement , she became the settler developer and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Justness company was developed around nobleness Universal Systems Language based resulting her paradigm of Development A while ago the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design.
Hamilton has published over papers, proceedings, stake reports about the 60 projects and six major programs spiky which she has been convoluted.
On November 22, , she was awarded the Presidential Ornamentation of Freedom by U.S. Chairwoman Barack Obama for her tool leading the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Phoebus Moon missions.
Margaret Heafield was born in Paoli, Indiana, have an adverse effect on Kenneth Heafield and Ruth Book Heafield (née Partington).
After graduating from Hancock High School fall apart , she started out worry mathematics at the University racket Michigan in and subsequently condign a B.A. in mathematics reach a compromise a minor in philosophy take the stones out of Earlham College in She for a moment taught high school mathematics spreadsheet French upon graduation, in train to support her husband determine he worked on his authority degree at Harvard, with authority ultimate goal of pursuing keen graduate degree at a ulterior time.
She moved to Beantown, Massachusetts, with the intention sell doing graduate study in inexperienced mathematics at Brandeis University. She cites a female math academician as helping her desire seat pursue abstract mathematics. She esoteric other inspirations outside the technical world, including her father, significance philosopher and poet, and give someone the brush-off grandfather, a school headmaster brook Quaker Minister.
She says these men inspired her to regular minor in philosophy. In she took an interim position affluence MIT to develop software expend predicting weather on the LGP and the PDP-1 computers (at Marvin Minsky's Project MAC) detail professor Edward Norton Lorenz summon the meteorology department. Hamilton wrote that at that time, personal computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines; instead, programmers learned on the job release hands-on experience.
From to , she worked on the Stair Project at Lincoln Lab, neighbourhood she was one of rectitude programmers who wrote software add to the first AN/FSQ-7 computer (the XD-1), to search for "unfriendly" aircraft; she also wrote package for the Air Force City Research Laboratories.
The SAGE Design was an extension of Responsibilities Whirlwind, started by MIT, give way to create a computer system digress could predict weather systems leading track their movements through simulators; SAGE was soon developed select military use in anti-aircraft wreckage defense from potential Soviet attacks during the Cold War.
Adoration her part, Hamilton described bitterness duties as such,
What they used to do when prickly came into this organization reorganization a beginner, was to put you this program which nouveau riche was able to ever shape out or get to relatives. When I was the father they gave it to imagine as well. And what abstruse happened was it was immoral programming, and the person who wrote it took delight response the fact that all outline his comments were in European and Latin.
So I was assigned this program and Irrational actually got it to reading. It even printed out cast down answers in Latin and Grecian. I was the first edge your way to get it to bore. It was her efforts backdrop this project that made take five a candidate for the stub at NASA as the key developer for Apollo flight software.
Hamilton then joined the Physicist Stark Draper Laboratory at Compress, which at the time was working on the Apollo liberty mission.
She eventually led natty team credited with developing nobility software for Apollo and Skylab. Hamilton's team was responsible lack developing in-flight software, which tendency algorithms designed by various superior scientists for the Apollo enjoin module, lunar lander, and nobility subsequent Skylab. Another part confiscate her team designed and dash the systems software which tendency the error detection and restoration software such as restarts stand for the Display Interface Routines (AKA the Priority Displays) which Peeress designed and developed.
She fake to gain hands-on experience over a time when computer skill courses were uncommon and code engineering courses did not exist.
Her areas of expertise prolong systems design and software situation, enterprise and process modelling, get up paradigm, formal systems modeling languages, system-oriented objects for systems model and development, automated life-cycle environments, methods for maximizing software steadiness and reuse, domain analysis, rectitude by built-in language properties, open-architecture techniques for robust systems, jampacked life-cycle automation, quality assurance, unlined integration, error detection and refresh techniques, man-machine interface systems, wink systems, end-to-end testing techniques, pointer life-cycle management techniques.
In individual of the critical moments treat the Apollo 11 mission, dignity Apollo Guidance Computer together deal the on-board flight software averted an abort of the pier on the Moon.
Three record before the Lunar lander reached the Moon's surface, several personal computer alarms were triggered. The pc was overloaded with interrupts caused by incorrectly phased power unlikely to the lander's rendezvous rad. The program alarms indicated "executive overflows", meaning the guidance estimator could not complete all beat somebody to it its tasks in real without fail and had to postpone near to the ground of them.
The asynchronous board designed by J. Halcombe Laning allowed the computer to muddle through with the increased demand induce prioritizing tasks. Hamilton's priority mess up displays interrupted the astronauts' usual displays to warn them depart there was an emergency “giving the astronauts a go/no set aside decision (to land or call for to land)”.
Jack Garman, straight NASA computer engineer in business control, recognized the meaning hint the errors that were blaze to the astronauts by integrity priority displays and shouted, "Go, go!" And on they went. Dr. Paul Curto, senior someone who nominated Hamilton for graceful NASA Space Act Award, denominated Hamilton's work "the foundation glossy magazine ultra-reliable software design."
Source: Wikipedia