Professor Hannah Fry

Mathematician and broadcaster Hannah Fry is Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the first person to ever hold the title. She is a fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, and president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and was a Professor in the Mathematics of Cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL where she studied patterns in human behaviour. As well as her academic work, Hannah is a regular presenter of science and maths programmes on TV and radio, including Contagion!, a prescient look at how diseases spread and pandemics happen, and The Secret Genius of Modern Life which explored incredible inventions we often barely notice. Hannah is known for her joyful ability to bring mathematical ideas to life for audiences of all interests and abilities. She also co-hosts the podcast The Rest is Science.

Having specialised in fluid dynamics, Hannah worked briefly in Formula 1 aerodynamics before returning to academia. At UCL she worked with physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, architects, and geographers to study the patterns in human behaviour and looking at urban environments and human activity from shopping habits to transport use to riots. These patterns of activity have also been applied to how diseases spread through day-to-day contact.

Hannah considers the maths of the everyday; how numbers and formulae can explain behaviours, predict events, change lives and reveal the truth behind commonly held myths. She also examines the insights data can provide, as well as where its limitations are. She looks at how a lack of care in collecting or understanding data can not just embed biases, but even amplify them, excluding and discriminating against groups, and having a damaging impact on fairness, diversity, and inclusion. She also considers what data can (and can’t) tell us about ourselves, the trouble with automation and AI, and why there are dangers leaving one side in charge. Hannah speaks about predicting the future and why we need quantitative thinking to know which parts of our future can be forecast. She examines how AI is revealing incredible new insights and developing more effective processes and considers its often-overlooked shortcomings and unjustified hype. Looking at the realities of the revolutionary ideas behind AI she considers the controversies, ethical considerations, and scare-stories, as she does in her book Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine.

On television, Hannah has explored Climate Change By Numbers, and recounted the story of computing pioneer Ada Lovelace in Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing. She shared a personal video diary of her journey with cervical cancer in Making Sense of Cancer, and explored the statistics of how we diagnose and treat the disease. The documentary series The Secret Genius of Modern Life saw her look at the secrets behind the miraculous technologies of the modern world from bank cards, trainers, electric cars, and fitness trackers. She fronted the BBC programmes A Day in the Life of Earth and Unvaccinated, and co-hosted The Great British Intelligence Test, and guest hosted Have I Got News For You. In her Bloomberg series The Future, Hannah questioned our collective future and what we want it to look like, with the breakthroughs in science and technology that will transform our lives and society, in a way that happens with us rather than to us. On radio, Hannah has appeared on Computing Britain, Can Maths Combat Terrorism, and co-hosts (originally with geneticist Adam Rutherford, latterly with Dara O Briain) Radio 4’s Curious Cases.