I think people have this hang-up from school that maths is this dusty old textbook that was finished hundreds of years ago, and all the answers are in the back. Whereas in my job I struggle to find anything that maths can't offer an interesting perspective on.
— Hannah Fry
Writing about 'What is art?' is not something I ever thought I'd be doing.
There's barely any aspect of our modern lives that hasn't had a mathematical contribution at some point and yet, if you asked the average person, they might think that maths is just difficult, irrelevant and uninteresting.
I'm writing a book called 'The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus' about the maths of Christmas: how to set up a secret Santa so it's totally fair; how to decorate your tree mathematically; how to win at Monopoly.
I'm an academic. I did my PhD in fluid dynamics and now I work at the University College London in an interdisciplinary department looking at patterns of human behaviour in urban settings.
Everything we're doing online is being not just monitored, but that information is being packaged up and sold and resold to manipulate us.
The Gottman Institute's study about arguments in long-term relationships concludes that couples with the best chance at long-term success are the ones with a low negativity threshold: if something's wrong, they speak up about it immediately. That's something I've taken on board.
Curating our data is valuable. Like 23andMe - while selling us the chance to know whether we're Vikings or whatever, they're amassing these huge DNA databases that are unimaginably valuable. Get people to pay you to add their DNA to this database. Genius!
One of the first things I did when I finished my Ph.D. was work with the police to look at what happened during the London riots in 2011, which took over the city.
There's actually an awful lot of mathematics that goes into designing a railway, keeping it running, making sure everything runs optimally. Every time you need something to be optimal there's going to be some mathematics at play.
