Online trolls wage ‘sexist vendetta’ against black hole scientist Katie Bouman using photo of team member Andrew Chael – but he fights back
- Viral memes claim Harvard graduate student wrote ‘850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code’ for the algorithm used to produce the image, which Chael denies
- Both scientists emphasise teamwork aspect of historic astrophysics breakthrough
As the world stared in wonder this week at the first image of a black hole, a new star was born here on Earth: Katie Bouman, 29, a postdoctoral researcher who developed an algorithm that was key to capturing the stunning visual.
On the ugliest corners of the internet, however, this sudden fame for a young woman in a male-dominated field could not stand. A corrective was quickly found in Andrew Chael, another member of the Event Horizon Telescope team.
On social media, memes quickly went viral contrasting Bouman with Chael, who – per the viral images – was actually responsible for “850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm!”
The implication was clear: Bouman, pushed by an agenda-driven media, was getting all the attention. But Chael had done all the real work.
That is completely wrong, Chael said in a viral Twitter thread of his own on Thursday night. Not only are the claims in the meme flat-out incorrect, but Chael – as an openly gay man – is also part of an under-represented demographic in his field.