I am so tired of the media exaggerating the contributions of women in major successful projects – women’s contributions to major unsuccessful projects are never mentioned – and of women claiming more credit than they should. Published 10 hours ago. Extracts:

A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole.

Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible…

Excitedly bracing herself for the groundbreaking moment, Dr Bouman was pictured loading the image on her laptop.

“Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made [J4MB emphasis] of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed,” she wrote in the caption to the Facebook post.

She started making the algorithm three years ago while she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory [J4MB emphasis]…

In the hours after the photo’s momentous release, Dr Bouman became an international sensation, with her name trending on Twitter…

But Dr Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit.

The effort to capture the image, using telescopes in locations ranging from Antarctica to Chile, involved a team of more than 200 scientists. [J4MB emphasis]

“No one of us could’ve done it alone,” she told CNN. “It came together because of lots of different people from many different backgrounds.”…

The results of the algorithms were then analysed by four separate teams to build confidence in the veracity of their findings.

“We’re a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that’s what it took to achieve something once thought impossible,” Dr Bouman says.

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