alt Hacker NewsHannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach
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Well deserved.
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
Congrats Hannah. I'll pile on with my own anecdote; I've run an internal conference at work for several years and we always book an external speaker.
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.
> As Fry says, the limit to someone's understanding is never their ability to understand. The limit is always in their motivation to care. And she sees her role as being to provide that motivation.
> "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.
What I love most is that Hannah Fry didn't get into the Cambridge undergraduate(?) math program (maths programme for you Brits) but became a math professor at Cambridge. Go Hannah!
I’m a big fan of her current podcast - The Rest Is Science. Informative and entertaining as well as being easy to listen to (I’m not a fan of many audio-only shows, so listenability is a big factor for me)
Ha, this prize comes with a million rupees cash, which makes it worth about $8 more than a Fields medal.
Correction: $292 less than the Fields, I went through too many layers of currency conversion. Still, it's nearly the same.
Anyone else here still follow her advice about how to quickly evict all the hot air in your car on a summer's day?
I really love Hannah, great communicator and keeps it interesting. If you're interested, I'd also recommend Brian Cox as a similarly fantastic representative for maths & science.
She is one of my favourite humans. Clever, witty, funny, hot and on the top I love the (timbre of) her voice. I listen to it on the podcast that she does with Michael Steven (The Rest is Science).
She was one of my favourite respondents in the old Numberphile videos
Most well deserved. For the uninitiated, highly recommend her 2019 Christmas lectures which are excellent.
She really is an extraordinary communicator.
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:
She gave a talk at my then employer during the pandemic, I think that was my first time listening to her. Well deserved.
I went to grab lunch then other day at work* and she was just randomly sitting in the canteen like a normal person.
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
Really well deserved! And to think her whole life's trajectory changed because of her year of saying "yes" to everything
Her Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@fryrsquared
Congrats Hannah! Been following since the TED talk, and her videos have always been a welcome addition to my day!
History and the meaning behind the name, "Leelavati Prize" (https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/leelavati-prize);
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
She's really nice, fun and engaging. She has a recent video about AI agents selling mugshots that's well made and clear.
She makes a great duo with Michael from V Sauce
I really liked her "Uncharted with Hannah Fry" podcast, sorry it ended.
interestingly you are starting to see a similar emphasis on outreach in tech these days with "forward deployed engineers" and "ai developer relations". Good to know people realize outreach is important. cheers and celebrations to professor fry!
Truly worth the prize! Sometimes I feel that she is punished by the algorithm, but great content nevertheless
I'd love to see her do a modern version of James Burke's Connections series. I think she's got a similar type of dry wit to Burke.
Made some of my favorite videos on YouTube. Wonderful!
Her tiktok channel is one of my favorites. Her ability to tell a maths story in such a clever way has always given me pause to watch. Congratulations to such a gifted communicator!
Well, I'm continually getting her videos suggested to me on YouTube. I'll just say that she has a very BBC manner to her.
Look forward to seeing her on Celebrity Traitors UK later this year.
It's been fun to see her steady rise since she first appeared on Numberphile more than ten years ago. She's a really excellent communicator of math and science.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rudzYPHuewc