Black Hole Imaging & Katie Bouman
How a celebratory image crossed the internet’s event horizon
Katie Bouman: Computer Scientist and Electrical Engineer
A crimson glowing ring encircling a circular black void alongside a picture of an excited 29 year old post doctorate posted on twitter in 2019 made Katie Bouman famous in a matter of hours.
“It required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.”
Dr. Bouman has worked to combine a variety of astronomy and computer science techniques to produce the first picture of a black hole. Using the Event Horizon Telescope Network’s massive amount of information, she led the development of a black hole imaging algorithm named CHIRP.
At age 29, Dr. Bouman has worked hard in her field to get to this discovery. She conducted imaging research at Purdue University as a high school student and set her sights on all things imaging. After obtaining an electrical engineering degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, Bouman went on to earn her masters in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her master’s thesis, Estimating Material Properties of Fabric through the Observation of Motion, was even awarded the Ernst Guillemin Award for best Master’s Thesis in electrical engineering. She continued on to earn her doctorate at MIT as well.
Her story is everywhere, being praised for shattering glass ceilings. Bouman delivered a TEDx talk to explain how they used algorithms to capture an image of the black hole. She represents a small number of women in the field and is being herald as an influential role-model for young women. It is also important, while telling Dr. Bouman’s story, to share the discussion her story sparked on twitter. Her story is a bacon of hope for others working hard to get noticed in STEM. It also sparked an faction who debunked her contribution, calling her a fraud. Internet trolls claimed a male colleague wrote the majority of the algorithm and that Katie was taking credit for his work. Andrew Chael defended Bouman in a tweet. “If you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away,” he shared. Bouman repeatedly denied crediting herself as a “lone -genius” and reiterated that the project couldn’t have been accomplished without the global contributions if more than eight sites and over 200 researchers.
“There are women involved in every single step of this amazing project,” said Sara Issaoun, 24, a graduate student at Radboud University in the Netherlands who worked on the research. “As a woman in STEM myself, it’s good to have role models out there who young girls and young boys can look up to.”[3]
Bouman is a great role model who shares the sentiment we create better together. Her group is analyzing the Event Horizon Telescope’s images to learn more about general relativity with a large gravitational field.
- Bouman, Katie. “Katie Bouman | Speaker | TED”. www.ted.com. Retrieved April 10, 2019.
- Guarino, Ben (April 10, 2019). “Algorithms gave us the black hole picture. She’s the 29-year-old scientist who helped create them”. The Washington Post. Retrieved April 16, 2019.
- Mervosh, Sarah (April 11, 2019). “How Katie Bouman Accidentally Became the Face of the Black Hole Project”. The New York Times. Retrieved April 12, 2019.
- Anon (April 11, 2019). “The woman behind first black hole image”. bbc.co.uk. BBC News.
- “Katie Bouman aka Katherine L. Bouman”. people.csail.mit.edu. Retrieved April 11, 2019.
- Koren, Marina (April 15, 2019). “The Dark Saga of Katie Bouman”. The Atlantic. Retrieved May 12, 2019.