Meet the awesome woman programmer behind the moon landing
When you think back to the moon landing you think of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. But, like they say, behind every great man is a great woman.
Meet Margaret Hamilton, the woman behind the computer program that put a man on the moon.
According to Vox, astronauts utilized something called the Apollo Guidance Computer to navigate the spacecraft and Hamilton headed the team of MIT programmers that made it happen.
Being female coder back in the late 1950s and early '60s is impressive enough -- but Hamilton wasn't just any coder. Her team created a system so good that it anticipated that the computer would be overloaded with unnecessary radar data during the lunar landing to the point it might stop working. So she programmed it to automatically reboot and clean the slate -- effectively making the Apollo 11 mission a success.
Not to mention, Hamilton also coined the term 'software engineer.'
SEE MORE: Today in history: First ever American spacewalk took place June 3rd, 1965Since those days things have changed a lot for women in science and computer engineering, but not enough. There was a dramatic drop in women majoring in computer science after 1984.
NPR suggests that women lost interest around the advent of the personal computer and subsequent marketing of them solely to boys and men.
Today, nonprofits like Girls Who Code are gaining steam to help close the gender gap in the computer sciences by exposing more young girls to coding at an early age.
Even super model Karlie Kloss has gotten in on the action, starting #kodewithkarlie, a scholarship program for young girls to participate in an intensive coding course.
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