Margaret Hamilton is the greatest engineer alive. Full stop. She is a living legend that gave birth to the entire field of software engineering, and Brought man to the moon. This may sound like exaggeration or dogma. But I believe that my position will sound more reasonable once you understand the scale and consequences of achievements.

Margert Hamilton, born in August 17 1936 and educated in pure mathematics at Brandeis College. She Joined the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory in 1965 and quickly promoted as lead software engineer in programming the Apollo guidance computer. She was tasked with something that shouldn’t have possible with 1960 computing technology, designing a computer that takes man to the moon and then back in home in one piece. Today, designing a computer to guide a spaceship to the moon seems relatively trivial given all the things we have accomplished with computing in the time since. But the 60’s making a computer powerful enough to do complex astrophysics math to fit in the tiny Apollo capsule was tantamount to squeezing blood from a stone.

This video goes into the challenges of making the Apollo Guidance into more depth. But in addition to doing all the complicated math, the Apollo Guidance Computer needed to be literally crashed proof. Because Apollo was a fly-by-wire spacecraft, any glitch, bug or error would be deadly. And so, she Built it: A crashproof, coded entirely in low-level assembly language, independent, fly-by-wire, multitasking computer with only two kilobytes of RAM and 72 kilobytes of ROM fit into the size of a breadbox during a time when computer science classes didn’t exist and computer were size of large room.