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Ten computer codes that transformed science

From Fortran to arXiv.org, these advances in programming and platforms sent biology, climate science and physics into warp speed.
  1. Jeffrey M. Perkel
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In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team gave the world the first glimpse of what a black hole actually looks like. But the image of a glowing, ring-shaped object that the group unveiled wasn’t a conventional photograph. It was computed — a mathematical transformation of data captured by radio telescopes in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain and the South Pole1. The team released the programming code it used to accomplish that feat alongside the articles that documented its findings, so the scientific community could see — and build on — what it had done.

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Nature 589, 344-348 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00075-2

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 22 January 2021: An earlier version of this feature erroneously stated that Paul Ginsparg migrated an early version of the arXiv preprint sharing system to the Internet.

  • Update 19 February 2021: This article has been updated with data from a survey that asked readers to weigh in on the codes selected in the Feature (see ‘Top choices for science code’ and ‘Overlooked software’).

  • Correction 08 April 2021: An earlier version of this story erred in describing the IPython Notebook development team and the size of the first version that was released.

References

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