Hannah Predicted a Pandemic | The Rest Is Science
The second one also managed to predict the use of trusted media and keeping intercontinental flights going throughout the pandemic.
I thought our first confirmed case was in York, very late in January 2020, who was staying at the Staycity hotel while visiting a family member attending the University here. That hotel is just around the corner from where we do martial arts of an evening, so we were acutely aware of that bit of news. Though IIRC they were from another country, so might not count depending on how "UK's Covid patient zero" is defined.
Contagion used GPS logging to predict who was where an applied a random transmission risk based on that.
The actual origin of the Bluetooth proximity and duration tracking was from FluPhone back in 2010 or so[0]
Human contact networks, and epidemiology is a long standing science COVID just made that apparent for the lay public.
Quarantines have existed for centuries, contact tracing is Victorian (smallpox mostly),social distancing, It was all application of research that largely already existed.
[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/projects/archive...
The hardest part of a 5 day snap lockdown are the first 10 weeks.
* That censorship is essential.
* That any public disagreement will be responded to with terms of personal abuse.
* That you can use it to introduce/try out all kinds of other long-desired schemes like digital ID (so called passports) or increasing working from home.
History shows that the biggest danger from humans is when they follow leaders' statements without question. They are capable of anything when their personal responsibility is outsourced. Obedience is not always a virtue.
Dissidence =/= fringe beliefs
I certainly see the near abandonment of vulnerable groups such as addicts and the elderly as unempathetic. I knew some people who died that way, including one who drank himself to death due to complete lack of offline support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFVXsjVdvmY
And when she straight laughs in Michael Steven's face about the price of a pencil.
She remains my (close) second favourite[1], with a choose your own adventure talk about algorithms. It was genuinely great, and warm, and thoughtful (a lot of it was about the risks of algorithms, which is very relevant for us).
This was... 2021 so mid COVID (yep it was remote) and so just before she became really big. We've worked with a lot of external speakers since, many of them very good or very slick, but she was the only one that was clearly both brilliant at her topic(s) and also an exceptional communicator.
[1] For the record my favourite is Clifford Agius who is some guy I saw at a local conference who in his spare time from being a commercial pilot builds fully robotic arms for kids - he even lets them give the finger. Great guy and refused to charge us more than a few hundred quid.
Fun fact: When I applied to Cambridge I was interviewed by Mary Beard.
Top universities hiring professors can pick any they want.
But also discovering a passion for academia can occur at any institution, reaching the pinnacle of the career is an enormous commitment.
Either due to corruption or, even more likely, institutional biases.
Malcolm Gladwell has a few episodes of revisionist history that looks at some US universities who fall into this trap.
Even with all that said; the chances of a selection process for 17/18 year olds being able to correctly select the best future adults in their field is very low.
Another good example; the number of young geniuses or prodigies (whether maths, chess, acting etc.) who don't make anything of themselves.
It's very hard to predict from a half hour interview precisely who will do well in future, and in fact some people might do better having gone to other universities. Oxford and Cambridge aren't the best choice for everybody - I'm sure being a bigger fish in a smaller pond suits some people better.
I read a study a while ago (sorry Google didn't find it again) that said a lot of exceptionally gifted people just don't apply to elite universities. Instead, the main characteristic of applicants tends to be that they are extremely driven.
Drive tends to not correlate well to long term success without talent as a companion. Therefore a lot of people at Cambridge (which I think was the example) tend to do no better than the average in later life (notably wasn't true for PPE grads obviously)
that's a complete sentence already
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-claims-by-Malcolm-Gladwe...
> She is the first Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge,
I am not sure that she is a "math professor", but that she is a "professor of the public understanding of mathematics". The latter seems softer.
She is an expert in applied mathematics (president of the applicable UK institute, actually) and this is absolutely of a piece with that; it's not some wishy-washy thing that she does.
Public understanding of science has proved to be a valuable field, and I think this will be important. Her Oxford opposite number, arguably, is Marcus du Sautoy, who has the Public Understanding of Science professorship that was originally created for Dawkins.
But, that was not at Cambridge, which is what the original post by vgivanovic claimed, right? It was at University College London.
> Public understanding of science has proved to be a valuable field,
I never contested that, assuming that it is done responsibly and well. But that field, as well as a large proportion of her activities and work, as well as the title "Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics", seem softer and less hardcore than many other titles for professors regarding mathematics.
A field can be both soft and valuable, assuming the field is handled responsibly and well.
> president of the applicable UK institute
A president is not primarily a researcher, right? More about external relations, strategy, management, etc., as far as I know. Mentioning her being a president weakens your argument, and strengthens my argument, as far as I can tell. There are other former presidents of that institute that likewise have had a more educational focus instead of hardcore research focus, like Celia Hoyles as far as I can tell.
> She is an expert in applied mathematics
She does have a PhD, but apart from that, her research work has been more focused on softer topics as far as I can tell. Do you know of any work after her PhD that was more hardcore research? The publications I found were more soft, like "The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus (2015)", a few years after completing her PhD.
Do you know if she has been employed in the private sector regarding what one could perceive as more hardcore research or engineering? She seems to be very hardworking and active, and have written a lot of books and worked with a lot of movies and other media, apart from being a president of an institute and being a professor, so it would be impressive if she also found both time and energy for hardcore research. I don't know if other professors would be able to take on that many challenges at once. She cannot be described as lazy by any means.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01303
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S1473-3099(20)30457-6/full...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03164-7
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.16.20023754v...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-...
Etc etc. That’s papers in Nature, The Lancet, The European Journal of Applied Mathematics etc. If you actually searched you would have found tons and tons of papers and citations. She clearly does “hardcore” research by any reasonable definition as you would expect given she has been for some time a professor at UCL which is a top-tier university.
She is a properly impressive person who warrants no shade, but it never surprises me to see it.
You’re not exactly making the best impression here. This is such a bizarre thread. You have nit-picked someone’s choice of words into an extraordinary series of implicit slights against someone who has won a prize for the very thing at which she excels, and you really are inviting a lot of theories as to why; very few of them favourable.
Having gone through all your comments in this thread, it is clear that you are just an "anonymous coward" and a troll, deriding and denigrating other folks commendable life work for no reason at all.
Instead of hiding behind anonymity, why don't you share your qualifications and competencies with us so that we can judge for ourselves on what basis you made the above statements and what they are worth? Do you have the spine to stand behind your criticisms in real life?
Your criticisms above are just general "shade-throwing and innuendos" with nothing specific to them. Preprints have far greater readership (and hence are a form of informal peer review) than official journals due to lack of paywall restrictions. The position of an author's name in a paper does not always reflect the magnitude of their contribution to it. Often it is just alphabetical, seniority-based (i.e. age), in-group vs. out-group or simply first-come first-noted. Your comments about statistics are laughable. Do you even know what you are talking about? Probability/Statistics are fundamental to Hannah's work. Contrary to what you may think many do check/verify the data which they study in a paper (it is trivial with Computers/AI nowadays). Pointing to reproducibility crisis/scandals simply implies that you have nothing worthwhile to contribute but are simply "throwing shade" for the sake of it (which any fool can do).
Hannah Fry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Fry) has a PhD from UCL for research on fluid dynamics and the Navier–Stokes equations. Do you know how hardcore a domain that is in Applied Mathematics/Physics? She then became lecturer/professor at "UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCL_Centre_for_Advanced_Spatia... Do you have any idea of what they do? She then was made a "Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering" and then became President of the "Institute of Mathematics and its Applications". All before finally joining Cambridge as the university's first "Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics". Google Scholar will show one the list of papers authored/co-authored by her if anybody wants to check.
By any measure the above is an outstanding record in mathematics scholarship. Nobody is claiming that she is the second coming of Euler/Gauss but in her own way she has achieved and done much in and for mathematics.
She chose to work on the popularization of mathematics and has done an excellent job of it in recognition of which the "International Mathematical Union" awarded the "Leelavati Prize" to her for outstanding contributions for increasing public awareness of mathematics as an intellectual discipline and the crucial role it plays in diverse human endeavors...[and]...outstanding public outreach work for mathematics. (https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/leelavati-prize)
Given how Modern Science and Mathematics feels like sheer "magic" to the common man (because they are not well explained and hence hard to understand) we need more people like Hannah who work on explaining/popularizing them; the main reason that Cambridge/Oxford/Other universities are establishing chairs for these disciplines. I would argue that this is the need of the hour for all scientific disciplines now.
PS: The Leelavati Prize 2026: A conversation with Hannah Fry - https://plus.maths.org/leelavati-prize-2026-conversation-wit...
> "I think what you need to do," she says about the key to connecting with a wide audience, "is to create a hole in people’s imagination. If I can create just a moment where you want to know the next bit – you know exactly the size and shape it needs to be to fulfill your craving for that exact piece of information – then everybody's in."
I wish we had more teachers that thought like this.
1) Leelavati Award - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leelavati_Award
The Leelavati Award is an award for outstanding contribution to public outreach in mathematics. It is named after the 12th-century mathematical treatise "Lilavati" devoted to arithmetic, algebra, and the decimal system written by the Indian mathematician Bhāskara II, also known as Bhaskara Achārya. In the book the author posed, in verse form, a series of problems in (elementary) arithmetic to one Leelavati (perhaps his daughter) and followed them up with hints to solutions. This work appears to have been the main source of learning arithmetic and algebra in medieval India. The work was also translated into Persian and was influential in West Asia
2) Līlāvatī (the work itself) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%ABl%C4%81vat%C4%AB
Wikipedia has the details; Lilavati's Daughters: The Women Scientists of India - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilavati%27s_Daughters
From "Indian Academy of Sciences" - https://www.ias.ac.in/Initiatives/Women_in_Science/Lilavatis...
Ebook available from internet archive - https://archive.org/details/A0560IASLeelavathisDaughterFullB...
Everybody should buy a copy for their children, especially young girls.
I still remember the "Rocket Women of India" behind ISRO's Chandrayaan/Mangalyaan missions and how inspiring it was to learn about them. There can be no better role models; extremely intelligent, humble and all-round achievers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNhtZ8Ufy0&t=1s and https://rocket-women.com/2023/08/the-rocket-women-of-chandra... and https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/women-scientist...
PS: In this context, see also the 2-vol The Mind of an Engineer, a series from Scientists/Researchers/Engineers of India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46365415
It also just feels too fake to me. I know they already knew the info they just had a strong reaction to, but they're reacting strongly on purpose for the sake of being engaging. I didn't find it annoying to start with, but it got more grating as I tried more episodes.
I recall in one episode she says "That's amazing" or something to that effect, to a fact regarding fluid dynamics. She has a PhD in fluid dynamics. She already knew whatever that fact was.
The video version is also a lot of fun to watch while doing dishes
Correction: $292 less than the Fields, I went through too many layers of currency conversion. Still, it's nearly the same.
Fun fact: I heard an interview with her and she said she got into maths because her family are all crazy about Formula One racing and she thought working on the aerodynamics etc would be interesting. She eventually got her “dream job” working on aerodynamics of F1 cars and found it really boring because she didn’t really get to do maths, all she did was write python simulations, leave them to run overnight and read the results in the morning, so she phoned her supervisor (who had worked his personal contacts to introduce her for the F1 job) and went back to working in his lab.
We chatted about Ada Lovelace (a topic she also did a documentary about for the BBC) and she was exactly the same in person as her personality is on the TV / Radio / Podcasts.
That was definitely a highlight of that year for me.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qw8x/episodes/downloads Is really rather good, its a long form version of her corporate speeches
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07dx75g/episodes/downloads...
Curious cases with Adam rutherford was most excellent. They appeared to be great friends and spent a lot of the time taking the piss out of each other and doing great explanations. The ones with Dara are ok, but not as good.
She has an actor's control of her countenance, which allows her control over that mischievous, slightly conspiratorial tone she uses when she wants you to know something really fun, or be excited by some knowledge.
I love to recommend this charming little clip from a fun sort of "science of Christmas" short film for kids she appeared in with the brilliant Lenny Rush:
I did like a quadruple-take then totally non-covertly took a photo to add their life-essence to my celebrity collection.
* Google DeepMind in LON
https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLqq4LnWs3olV_z1ZXBSDTbcXEBNO...
Her most memorable program for me was her 2018 program "Contagion" which modelled a virus outbreak among volunteers in the town of Haslemere, UK, using an app measuring Bluetooth proximity.
Guess which town contained the UK's Covid patient zero a year later!
Edit: found it here https://youtu.be/yISdMLbO0Wc?is=T-Tq9LwzLgbusuoe