And soon she found higher-paying work at MIT’s Lincoln Lab (funded by the Department of Defense), which was facing a shortage of programmers. Working on Lorenz’s project brought Hamilton an unusual amount of experience with some of the world’s earliest computers. That really meant the world to me.” Learning More at MIT In Brock’s interview, Hamilton said that she was given credit by Lorenz himself: “Later on, years later, like maybe five years ago, I realized in one of his well-known papers, he thanked me for all the programming. “This is an all-too-common story in the histories of science and technology,” noted Jennifer Light, the department head for MIT’s Science, Technology and Society program, in a 2019 interview with the science magazine Quanta. “I said, ‘Well, you know, you have to do what’s right for you, and I have to do what’s right for me.’ He said, ‘Oh, OK.'” Hamilton recalled how one of her male colleagues had once asked her how she could take a programming job “when you have a baby at home?” Yet while today they’d be listed as co-authors, both programmers are rarely mentioned when telling the history of chaos theory. To take her place programming the simulations, Hamilton hired Ellen Fetter, who had recently graduated from Mount Holyoke with a degree in math. Hamilton programmed meteorological simulations for the professor, which in the interview she describes as “one of the best things I ever did … I hadn’t really been near a computer before.” “It is Lorenz who popularized the notion of the ‘butterfly effect'” notes Brock’s blog post, “the concept that a small difference can yield a huge change within certain systems, like the flap of a seagull’s wing causing a storm, or the flutter of a butterfly’s wing determining the path of a tornado.” Lorenz later became known as one of the founders of chaos theory.
In the early 1960s, Hamilton had planned to pursue a graduate degree in mathematics, but while her husband attended law school, Hamilton supported the family by taking a job with MIT professor Edward N. She added, “That was the only time somebody in college questioned that that might not be something I would be able to make use of.”īut Hamilton remained undeterred: “I just said, ‘Because I want to take it,’ you know.” Historic Projects and Getting Credit Hamilton remembered being the only woman in her college physics class - “And at the time, I think the professor thought women should not be taking physics because he … well, you have to know the times.” This week that interview has finally been published online - including video of his conversation with the then 81-year-old pioneer.īut that interview also catches glimpses of what it was like to be another kind of pioneer - a woman in a field that was predominantly male. In an email this week to The New Stack, he calls the opportunity “an incredible privilege,” noting Hamilton’s historic significance for a “deep involvement of some of the most important contexts and projects in the first decades of computing in the United States.” So it was with extra excitement that - in April 2017 - Brock headed to Boston to capture an oral history with her.
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Brock, a technology historian and curator/director at the Software History Center of Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum. Yet despite these achievements, Hamilton “rarely gives interviews or speaks publicly about herself,” writes David C.
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That project included writing 40,000 lines of code for the moon-landing lunar module, and its “mothership,” the orbiting craft carrying the command and service modules.Īnd that was just the beginning of a career in computer science that has lasted more than half a century - and still continues.
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And when NASA launched a series of missions that led to the first astronauts on the moon, Hamilton was director of the Software Engineering Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Instrumentation Laboratory, developing the mission’s onboard flight software.
In the early 1960s, Margaret Hamilton began her career as a pioneering programmer and systems designer.
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