We Wouldn’t Have the First Black Hole Image Without Katie Bouman

The 29-year-old computer scientist will go down in history.

Algorithmic Assist

It took a team of more than 200 scientists to create the first image of the event horizon of a black hole — and the internet is currently in love with one of them.

Computer scientist Katie Bouman led the development of the algorithm that made the breathtaking black hole image possible, and soon after the Event Horizon Telescope team revealed the photo on Wednesday, another image — this one a shot of Bouman that she posted to her Facebook page — started making the rounds online.

"Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed," the 29-year-old wrote of the photo, which was subsequently shared by everyone from CNN to Kamala Harris.

Women Who Code

The online photo frenzy wasn't over, though.

Many in the Twitterverse and beyond noted the similarities between an image of Bouman with piles of hard drives containing black hole image data and an image of another female computer scientist, Margaret Hamilton, standing next to the stacks of code she wrote to help NASA put astronauts on the Moon in 1969.

Still, Bouman, who is now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, is quick to note that creating the first black hole image wasn't a one-woman job.

"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."

READ MORE: That image of a black hole you saw everywhere? Thank this grad student for making it possible [CNN]

More on the black hole image: Scientists Just Released the First-Ever Image of a Black Hole