Andrew Chael blasted sexist social media attacks on Katie Bouman, who helped develop an algorithm used to capture this week's historic black hole photo.
After sexist social media trolls tried to diminish the role of computer scientist Katie Bouman in capturing this week’s first-ever image of a black hole by claiming a male colleague did most of the work, that coworker blasted them in a now-viral Twitter thread.
Harvard graduate student Andrew Chael, a member of the international team that took the historic photo, stood up for Bouman Thursday night against the sexist smears, explaining that her work was key to developing an algorithm for capturing the image.
“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,” Chael wrote.
Trolls began spreading memes on Reddit and Twitter this week, falsely claiming that Chael wrote “850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code” and “did 90% of the work. Where’s his credit?”
Chael set the record straight, explaining that Bouman, an assistant professor at Caltech, helped develop the algorithm while a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. He praised her “as an example of women’s leadership” in science and technology fields.
“While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software,” Chael explained. “It would have never worked without her contributions and the work of many others.”
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