The Self-Taught Computer Scientist

greatest common factor: The largest positive integer that evenly divides two or more other integers.
boundary condition: Input outside of the standard input you expect your program to receive.
prime number: A positive integer divisible only by itself and 1.
bitwise operator: An operator you can use in an expression with two binary numbers.
binary number: A number in the base 2 numeral system.
numeral system: A writing system for expressing numbers.

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Introduction to Algorithms
78
bit: In binary, a digit is called a bit, which stands for binary digit.
base: A numeral system’s base is the number of digits the system has.
place value: The numerical value a digit has because of its position in a number. 
Challenge
1. 
Research and write another way to find prime numbers.

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7
Self- Taught
Inspiration: 
Margaret Hamilton
All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school— my number- one 
piece of advice is: you should learn how to program.
Mark Zuckerberg
Today, there are so many resources to teach yourself how to program; it is easy to forget it wasn’t 
always that way. Margaret Hamilton, one of the original coders on the Apollo space mission and one of 
the greatest self- taught programmers of all time, made her mark on technology long before program-
ming courses were widely available.
While Hamilton did go to college (she received a B.A. from the University of Michigan in mathe-
matics), her programming skills were entirely self- taught. In the 1950s and ’60s, everyone was self- 
taught because computer science as we know it did not exist yet, so programmers had to figure things 
out on their own. At the time, the word 
software engineering didn’t even exist: Hamilton helped coin 
it! After she graduated from college in 1960, Hamilton began her programming career working at 
MIT on software called Project Whirlwind to predict the weather. While she was at MIT, she helped 
create the code for the world’s first portable computer.
Hamilton’s success with Project Whirlwind led to a position with SAGE, an organization that helped 
detect potential Soviet airstrikes during the Cold War. If you’re a 
Star Trek fan, you’ll know the story 
of the Kobayashi Maru— a training exercise for Starfleet cadets that was unwinnable. Future officers 
might not have been able to beat the game, but they could show important character traits through 
their choices. Hamilton encountered a real- life Kobayashi Maru situation and, like the infamous Cap-
tain Kirk, managed to beat it. Every newcomer to SAGE was given a practically unsolvable program 
and tasked with getting it to run. The programmer who created it even wrote comments in Greek and 
Latin to make the challenge harder. Hamilton was the first engineer to get it to run, which secured 
her place within the organization.
Her ability to solve difficult problems got her hired for NASA’s Apollo mission, culminating in Neil 
Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins landing on the moon in 1969. While the astronauts get 
the most credit for the historic mission, more than 400,000 people contributed to it, and Hamilton 
was instrumental to its success.

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