The Sexist Trolls Doubting Black Hole Researcher Katie Bouman Need to Learn to Code
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xz9yk/the-sexist-trolls-doubting-black-hole-researcher-katie-bouman-need-to-learn-to-code
Last week, fans of cool astronomical phenomena (read: almost everyone) rejoiced as an international team of scientists released the first ever image of a black hole. For the astrophysicists, software engineers, philosophers, and mathematicians who worked on the Event Horizon Telescope that captured the image, the announcement was an unprecedented milestone.
Their excitement was perhaps best embodied by a photo of one computer scientist on the Event Horizon Telescope team, Katie Bouman, who hid her beaming smile with her hands as she looked at the monumental rendering. Bouman had a lot to smile about—the image was created using petabytes of data that were stitched together using CHIRP, an algorithm that Bouman worked on. And Bouman had long served as a public face for the computer imaging aspect of the Event Horizon Telescope, delivering a TED Talk on the project in 2016.