77 Quotes by Hannah Fry

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.

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.

Writing about 'What is art?' is not something I ever thought I'd be doing.

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!

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.

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.

When designing algorithms as a business owner, your incentive is your profit, something for your business, it's not an incentive to maximise something for the individual.

And anytime a programmer makes a decision about how to deal with data, how to average it or clean it, you're imparting more of your own bias on it.

Imagine life without any algorithms at all, you wouldn't be able to do anything. This is already completely encompassing. We have a habit of over-trusting what mathematics or computer scientists tell us to do, without questioning it, too much faith in the magical power of analysis.