Andrew Chael got fucked. It absolutely appears that Chael wrote most of the useful code in the
eht-imaging codebase (though
Michael Johnson made some significant contributions too). The visual comparison of the github contributions in
that image Null posted suggests this to be the case, but what if most of his commits were boilerplate stuff? Well, we can note that he's first author on the
papers that
describe how the eht-imaging algorithm works. Importantly, that paper of his from 2016 develops most of what they essentially use for the black hole imaging, which means that by 2016 the eht-imaging code is mostly operational. (Snapshot from the 2016 article: )
In other words, a full two years before
Katie Bouman contributes her first 'line of code' to the repo.
Katie Bouman got fucked. First off, since the media can't seem to decide on what her credentials are (is she undergrad? is she a postgraduate student?), let's settle that now: she's a full-fledged Postdoc Researcher. Here's
her PhD thesis submitted back in 2017, on the topic of
computational methods for imaging black holes. Further, she has an
impressive CV of published articles related to computational imaging and machine learning, many of which she appears as first author on (in particular,
this paper of hers on VLBI is very relevant for the black hole imaging). In all likelihood, while she may not have done much of the coding, she probably still contributed a great deal of subject-matter expertise during the research.
Kazunori Akiyama (and friends) got fucked. Who?
Exactly. These guys independently wrote the
SMILI code that was used in the black hole imaging project to produce a second set of black hole images to compare/contrast with the ones from the eht-imaging team. The two results validate each others' work, were produced at the same time, and look equally impressive:
But the mainstream media didn't even mention them.
And probably many others got fucked. I mentioned
Michael Johnson earlier: he's second coauthor on pretty much every paper in the project, and contributed useful code to the eht-imaging library. Also, the list of authors for the journal article has hundreds of names on it. Now many of them probably didn't even contribute to the project (it's a well-known meme that Physics departments inflate authors lists by adding literally anyone who so much as stepped foot in the lab during the research). But as
@cecograph hinted at, there's bound to be some more people in the list who had critical contributions, but that nobody cares about because they aren't project lead/the cute woman/the gay guy.
