Katie Bouman of MIT not only rocked the world by giving us the first picture of an actual Black Hole this week, but she proved Einstein's famous Theory of Relativity in the process.
[Publisher's note - as a member of the Marvin Minsky MIT Society of the Mind, and we miss him a great deal, all Americans should take pride in the role MIT and our young people play with their enormous contributions to the future of our world. Jim Putnam]
[Publisher's note - as a member of the Marvin Minsky MIT Society of the Mind, and we miss him a great deal, all Americans should take pride in the role MIT and our young people play with their enormous contributions to the future of our world. Jim Putnam]
Yahoo Lifestyle
The
first image of a black hole was brought to you by Katie Bouman — and Twitter is
making sure no one forgets it
Paulina Cachero,Yahoo Lifestyle 16 hours ago 
A
network of eight radio observatories on six mountains and four continents
observed a black hole in Messier 87, a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the
constellation Virgo, on and off for 10 days in April of 2017 to make the image.
(Photo: Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
What
once was a figment of amorphous scientific predictions finally became a reality
on Wednesday after scientists released the first-ever photograph of a black
hole. While much of the public was awestruck by the long-anticipated photo,
others were making sure that the woman behind this remarkable moment— computer
scientist Katie Bouman—doesn’t get lost in history books.
Bouman
is a postdoctoral fellow working with the Event Horizon Telescope team that
released the revolutionary photograph. Bouman also led the development of a new
algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole as a grad student at
MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory three years ago.
Her groundbreaking algorithm stitched together “data collected from radio
telescopes scattered around the globe,” reported MIT News.
“Just
like how radio frequencies will go through walls, they pierce through galactic
dust. We would never be able to see into the center of our galaxy in visible
wavelengths because there’s too much stuff in between,” Bouman told MIT News in 2016. “[Taking a picture of the
black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy is] equivalent to taking an
image of a grapefruit on the moon, but with a radio telescope.”
The
fruits of her labor were only released on Wednesday. But, as news broke about
the monumental discovery, Bouman’s crucial contribution to the project appeared
to go largely overlooked. Many organizations credited the entire Event Horizon
Telescope team who worked to capture the image and praised Albert Einstein’s
theories on general relativity for predicting what the black hole might look
like.
But,
people online are making sure Bouman doesn’t become yet another hidden figure.
Users posted photos of Katie and asking people to give the trailblazing
scientist credit— like a Nobel Prize.
“BBC
News, Could Katie get a mention in the article itself and not just a credit on
the photo?” wrote one user.
“Not
on my watch!” tweeted another user. “Sick of women in the
room but not in the Nobel Prize room.”
Some
people online proposed that the science community name the groundbreaking
discovery after Bouman herself.
“Why
not name it the Bouman Black Hole, and get scifi writers slip a reference into
their characters' lines?” one Twitter user suggested. “‘Yes captain
Bouman, that was the first black hole imaged by your ancestor using Earth's
pre-warp imaging technology.’”
Meanwhile,
other Twitter users began comparing Bouman to past female hidden figures
including Rosalind Franklin, the pioneering molecular biologist who contributed
to our modern understandings of DNA, and Margaret Hamilton, the largely unknown
MIT female computer scientist who pioneered the “software” technology that
landed astronauts on the moon.
“Computer
scientist Katie Bouman and her awesome stack of hard drives for #EHTblackhole image data,”
Nature News
writer Flora Graham tweeted with an image of the two MIT
computer scientists side by side. “Reminds me of Margaret Hamilton and her
Apollo Guidance Computer source code.”
See
all the best reactions to the Black Hole here:
THE FIRST-EVER PICTURE OF A BLACK HOLE
IS HERE! Computer scientist
Katie Bouman led the development of the algorithm that made taking this picture
possible. Watch her @TEDxBeaconSt
talk to learn more: http://t.ted.com/MBrksnc
#EHTBlackHole
Computer scientist Katie Bouman and her awesome stack of
hard drives for #EHTblackhole
image data — reminds me of
Margaret Hamilton and her Apollo Guidance Computer source code.
