[throwawaysea]

Per Andrew Chael (the person who seemingly did most of the implementation in terms of code, and would therefore have some authority to speak to this) - https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854732747571...

> With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper

So taken at face value, her contribution seems to be this image testing framework and whatever she contributed to the paper.

Most articles attributed Bouman as the inventor of the algorithm used to generate the image. This was directly in the titles of these articles. Now it is clear her algorithm was not used in the generation of the image (see https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-blac...).

This isn't to say her own algorithmic work did not count as a contribution just because it wasn't used. I think that exploration matters, if only to see where that path leads while others explore alternative paths. She is listed as the primary author on this 2016 paper (http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/pw/papers_and_presentat...).

But I think given that there were at least 5 other papers here relating to image reconstruction, given that the code was written mostly by others, and given that 3 other algorithms (which she was not involved in) were used in the construction of the final image, I think it is fair to say that Bouman was not the woman behind the black hole picture. She was a woman, alongside a team of many women and many men. Sara Issaoun (female scientist on same project) said on Twitter that a team of 40 worked on image reconstruction: https://twitter.com/SaraIssaoun/status/1116304522660519936