New Delhi, Oct. 11 -- Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led the MIT team that wrote the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo moon missions, died September 30. She was 90. MIT announced her death on Wednesday in an obituary on MIT News, which described her as a profoundly influential computer scientist who helped establish software engineering as a discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, MIT said, and wrote more than 130 publications.

Leading Apollo's Software

Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936 and earned a mathematics degree from Earlham College in 1958. She moved to Boston the next year with her husband and took a temporary job in MIT's meteorology department, working on weather-predictio...