Dr Hannah Fry

Dr Hannah Fry speaker on the uses of mathematics and presenter of  Contagion! as well as BBC Four’s Pandemic and Horizon tracking the Covid-19 pandemic.

There are few superstar mathematicians but Dr Hannah Fry is definitely one. In her role as Associate Professor in the Mathematics of Cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London she investigates how mathematics can give us insights into human behaviour. As well as being a mathematician Dr Fry is an author, a speaker, a television presenter.

Hannah has contributed to BBC TV documentaries including City in the Sky, Britain’s Greatest Inventions, and Climate Change By Numbers, Horizon: How to Find Love Online, and The Joy of Data. Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing told of the life of the extraordinary computing pioneer Ada Lovelace.

Her 2018 television documentary Contagion! The BBC Four Pandemic was a sophisticated nationwide experiment to help to plan for ‘the next deadly pandemic’. In an experiment billed by The Guardian as ‘the viral hit that’ll have you reaching for the hand sanitiser’ Dr Fry played the part of ‘Patient Zero’ in the town of Haslemere.

Dr Hannah Fry is the author of Hello World, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas and of The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation. She delivered Royal Institution Christmas Lectures of 2019 on the hidden power of mathematics.

Dr Fry’s work for BBC Horizon in 2020 reflected on how data enabled her to predict the COVID-19 pandemic, and how mathematical modelling continues to play a vital role in tracking the future of the virus. Hannah Fry’s Coronavirus Special of April 2020 also looked to answer the question ‘How Do Vaccines Protect the Population?’ explaining the mathematics of immunity. The programme speculated that a vaccine would take between a year and eighteen months to develop and that ‘that would be an exceptionally fast turnaround’.

Contact Hannah Fry via a Specialist Speakers agent on +44 01455 633289 for both in-person and virtual engagements. Dr Hannah Fry is presented in partnership with Northbank.