A woman’s achievements helped to expand the frontiers of scientific knowledge – and then the sexist trolling started.
As the first ever image of a black hole circulated around social media and front pages around the world, the now viral image of Dr Katie Bouman, a 29-year-old computer scientist who helped it come to life, spread fast.
Bouman, whose excitement is palpable through the screen, led the development of an algorithm which created the pioneering image.
But her achievement – and that of the 200 researchers who also helped to create the picture – later became overshadowed as Bouman became the subject of sexist remarks online.
“Notice something? Yeah, that woman wrote about 2,000 lines of code total. Another guy wrote over 850,000. Katie barely worked on the project at all until late last year, Andrew Chael worked on it relentlessly from it’s conception.
“If anyone deserves the credit, it’s him,” one Reddit user, SmellyTheBluCow, wrote.
The post received nearly 13,000 ‘upvotes’ on the platform in less than 24 hours.
The post, under the subreddit r/unpopularopinion, sparked numerous debates online and off.
Among them was astrophysicist Andrew Chael himself, who quickly came to Bouman’s defence and appealed for the “awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman” to stop.
“If you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life”
- Andrew Chael
“While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data,” he explained in a Twitter thread.
He added: “So while I appreciate the congratulations on a result that I worked hard on for years, if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life.”
Claims that Chael also wrote 850,000 lines of code, as suggested in the Reddit post, were debunked by the scientist, who said the number was much lower.
And as one reddit user pointed out with the help of a Bill Gates quote, measuring the contribution in this way is unhelpful.
“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
As Bouman herself pointed out in a Facebook post: “No one algorithm or person made this image.”
Bouman, as she said in her TED talk in 2016, started research on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project in 2013.
“I didn’t know anything about black holes...and so from then, I started working trying to understand the problem,” she told Bloomberg.
“In order to come up with new algorithms that would allow us to take this unique, messy, sparse data and make pictures from it.”
“I’ve been so excited about this for so long...I am so excited to be able to share it with everyone.”
As the New York Times’ Sarah Mervosh helpfully pointed out: “It’s not Katie Bouman’s fault that she became the face of the project.”
The black hole image Bouman helped to capture provides a unique insight into the ruthless gravitational fields which remain impossible to see with the naked eye.
It measures 40 billion kilometres across and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun, and the image shows a ring of fire.
The unveiling of the findings from the Event Horizon Telescope programme is expected to help scientists link two apparently incompatible pillars of physics: Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Hat’s off to Katie Bouman.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated the mass of the M87 black hole as being 6.5 million times that of our sun, not 6.5 billion.