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- Hacker News
- She was one of my favourite respondents in the old Numberphile videosby yreg
- 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.
by card_zero - Well deserved. She is an excellent science communicator.by vaylian
- Any online writing that you'd recommend?by skybrian
- Agreed. A gifted communicator of over-looked topics in science and mathematics and is well deserved of this prize.by rvz
- very much
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qw8x/episodes/downloads Is really rather good, its a long form version of her corporate speeches
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07dx75g/episodes/downloads...
Curious cases with Adam rutherford was most excellent. They appeared to be great friends and spent a lot of the time taking the piss out of each other and doing great explanations. The ones with Dara are ok, but not as good.
by KaiserPro - Completely agree. I’d recommend her book “Hello world: How to be human in the age of the machine” to anyone who isn’t familiar. It’s one of those books where even if you know about programming, AI etc it’s worth reading because she hasn’t dumbed down the content even though she’s made it accessible to folks who don’t.
Fun fact: I heard an interview with her and she said she got into maths because her family are all crazy about Formula One racing and she thought working on the aerodynamics etc would be interesting. She eventually got her “dream job” working on aerodynamics of F1 cars and found it really boring because she didn’t really get to do maths, all she did was write python simulations, leave them to run overnight and read the results in the morning, so she phoned her supervisor (who had worked his personal contacts to introduce her for the F1 job) and went back to working in his lab.
by seanhunter - Anyone else here still follow her advice about how to quickly evict all the hot air in your car on a summer's day?by comprev
- Yup. And using it a lot recently ... !by kitd
- Yep, it was a game changer in this Texas heat!by malshe
- No, but now I really want to know what the advice is! Can you share it?by edanm
- 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.by arlattimore
- 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)by tomfakes
- I also like it a lot, but Hannah is a bit too giggly at times. Michael has some nerdish intonations. But still love it.by emmelaich
- It’s my favorite podcast right now!by cush
- It's also on youtube, so you can watch if you are so inclined.by nhinck3
- Yesssss
The video version is also a lot of fun to watch while doing dishes
by banditelol - I really like her, but man I find Michael unbearable.
It also just feels too fake to me. I know they already knew the info they just had a strong reaction to, but they're reacting strongly on purpose for the sake of being engaging. I didn't find it annoying to start with, but it got more grating as I tried more episodes.
I recall in one episode she says "That's amazing" or something to that effect, to a fact regarding fluid dynamics. She has a PhD in fluid dynamics. She already knew whatever that fact was.
by Novosell - > 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.
by fumeux_fume - Seems like great advice. Beyond what we think are intellectual curiosities, passion tends to be the main driver.by ricardo81
- 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
by rramadass - I heard it first through the the book Leelavati's daugthers (2019). India's celebration of women in science.by orsenthil
- 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!by vgivanovic
- She is great at popularity regarding mathematics, but her achievements do not seem to be primarily within hardcore mathematical research, more within popularity and communication.
> She is the first Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge,
I am not sure that she is a "math professor", but that she is a "professor of the public understanding of mathematics". The latter seems softer.
by hunnovi - I know another professor where this is also the case!by mttch
- Seems to happen to most top universities, or is there some context I'm missing?by mi_lk
- She went to UCL which is also a tier one university, though.by adw
- 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.
by ErrantX - 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.by ryangittins
- Yeah, her enthusiasm is contagious.by matsemann