Hannah Fry is a mathematician, author, lecturer, radio and television presenter, podcaster and public speaker. Her work includes studying the patterns of human behaviour, such as interpersonal relationships and dating and how mathematics can apply to them. Fry delivered the 2019 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.
Fry regularly appears on BBC Radio 4 in the UK, including in Computing Britain and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, which aired its 14th series in 2019. She has presented several BBC television programmes. In 2015, Fry presented a BBC Four film biography of Ada Lovelace. In 2016, she co-presented Trainspotting Live with Peter Snow, a three-part series about trains and trainspotting, for the same channel. In the BBC Two series City in the Sky Fry studies the logistics of aviation. She also hosted The Joy of Data on BBC Four, which examines the history and human impact of data. A further credit for 2016 was her co-hosting an episode of the BBC Two Horizon series with Dr Xand van Tulleken, titled "". In 2017, Fry presented an episode of Horizon titled "10 Things You Need to Know About the Future". In 2018, she presented Contagion! The BBC Four Pandemic, about the possible impact of a flu pandemic, and Magic Numbers, also on BBC Four, a three-part series which explored mathematical concepts. She hosted a one-off 90-minute special of the BBC science programme Tomorrow's World alongside four presenters from the show's original run: Maggie Philbin, Howard Stableford, Judith Hann and Peter Snow. In 2019, Fry presented a BBC Four programme titled A Day in the Life of Earth which explored how Earth changes in a single day and how these daily changes are essential to human existence. Fry also co-presented a Horizon episode titled "The Honest Supermarket", which covered a range of issues, including expiration dates and their impact on food waste, microplastics in the human food supply and the impact food consumption has on the environment. She presented the 2019 edition of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled "Secrets and lies", on the hidden numbers, rules and patterns that control daily lives; the three lectures were broadcast on BBC Four. In 2020, Fry co-presented The Great British Intelligence Test with Michael Mosley on BBC Two.
On 30 March 2014, Fry gave a TED talk at TEDxBinghamtonUniversity titled "The Mathematics of Love", which as of 2020 has attracted over 5.1 million views. Following the TED talk, she published a book on the topic – The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation – in which she applies statistical and data-scientific models to dating, sex and marriage. Fry has appeared in several videos for a YouTube mathematics channel, Numberphile, run by Brady Haran. She has also made an appearance on his podcast: The Numberphile Podcast.
Publications
Fry has written three books. The first, The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation, includes the "37% rule", a form of the secretary problem according to which roughly the first third of any potential partners should be rejected. The second, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus, discusses various Christmas-related topics and how mathematics can be involved in them, including a fair Secret Santa, decoration of Christmas trees, winning at Monopoly, and comparing the vocabulary of the Queen's Christmas message to Snoop Dogg. Her third book is Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms, reprinted the same year as Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine, which looks at the impact of algorithms that affect lives.
Awards and honours
In 2013, Fry won the UCL Provost's Public Engager of the Year award. The award recognises the work that UCL's staff and students are doing to open up the university. Fry was nominated for her broad portfolio of public engagement activities. In 2018, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the London Mathematical Society announced that Fry had won that year's Christopher Zeeman Medal "for her contributions to the public understanding of the mathematical sciences".
