Internet idiots are already trying to discredit Katie Bouman's historical achievements

"It gives the impression that she was the only one responsible that all this has happened – but that is not the case. It can be argued that others have contributed as much, if not more. That's what gives me the impression that this focus on it is not quite right, "said a user on the thread.

Another user on the The thread of Hacker News Bouman's performance is insignificant: "It's really short-sighted to say something like that. Code validation is actually the smallest impact you can have in a big project like this. There are more difficult and more significant ways to contribute to the success of the project. "

Another user claimed the title of the BBC on the history of Bouman showed a media bias: "She is not" the computer specialist behind her, she is "a" computer scientist behind her. If it's just about placing an interesting person with sympathetic facial features at the heart of the story, the titles and descriptions of the news articles might actually be accurate. "

The criticism that Bouman is one of only a few on the research paper shows a misunderstanding of how academic documents work. Bouman is the first author of his article "Digital Imaging for VLBI Image Reconstruction". The first author of a research paper is usually the person who has made the most important contributions. Athe long side Bouman, Michael D. Johnson, Daniel Zoran, Vincent L. Fish, Sheperd S. Doeleman and William T. Freeman worked to produce their conclusions.

We talked to doctor Jessica Wade, physicist and champion of diversity in STEMBouman faces the reaction: "The greatest scientific breakthroughs in the world – like the first direct image of a black hole – can only occur when large teams of international, diverse and diverse scientists work together. For centuries, the people we have chosen to attribute these discoveries are men. "

"Of course, Bouman will not have written all the code, just as Englert and Higgs are not solely responsible for the discovery of the Higgs boson. Instead of discrediting the contributions of Bouman and countless other women working on the Event Horizon telescope, we should take a step back and remind her that she did not ask for this recognition – people around the world just have enough that men are the only ones to be rented, "said Wade.

In the discussion on Hacker News, and even in our own Facebook comment section, several users say that Bouman's colleague Andrew Chael has written more than 850,000 lines on the 900,000 lines of code used to discover the black hole . Chael tweeted for his defense, saying that without Bouman and his contribution to the software, the project would never have been a success.