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Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach

maths.cam.ac.uk

111–116 of 116 posts

Re: Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach

#111
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why you have this weird axe to grind. Yes she has done research https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01303 https://www.thelancet.com/article/S1473-3099(20)30457-6/full... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03164-7 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.16.20023754v... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-... Etc etc. That’s papers in Nature, The Lancet, The Europe…

[flagged]

What a small-minded, mean-spirited, charlatan and poser you are!

Having gone through all your comments in this thread, it is clear that you are just an "anonymous coward" and a troll, deriding and denigrating other folks commendable life work for no reason at all.

Instead of hiding behind anonymity, why don't you share your qualifications and competencies with us so that we can judge for ourselves on what basis you made the above statements and what they are worth? Do you have the spine to stand behind your criticisms in real life?

Your criticisms above are just general "shade-throwing and innuendos" with nothing specific to them. Preprints have far greater readership (and hence are a form of informal peer review) than official journals due to lack of paywall restrictions. The position of an author's name in a paper does not always reflect the magnitude of their contribution to it. Often it is just alphabetical, seniority-based (i.e. age), in-group vs. out-group or simply first-come first-noted. Your comments about statistics are laughable. Do you even know what you are talking about? Probability/Statistics are fundamental to Hannah's work. Contrary to what you may think many do check/verify the data which they study in a paper (it is trivial with Computers/AI nowadays). Pointing to reproducibility crisis/scandals simply implies that you have nothing worthwhile to contribute but are simply "throwing shade" for the sake of it (which any fool can do).

Hannah Fry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Fry) has a PhD from UCL for research on fluid dynamics and the Navier–Stokes equations. Do you know how hardcore a domain that is in Applied Mathematics/Physics? She then became lecturer/professor at "UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCL_Centre_for_Advanced_Spatia... Do you have any idea of what they do? She then was made a "Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering" and then became President of the "Institute of Mathematics and its Applications". All before finally joining Cambridge as the university's first "Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics". Google Scholar will show one the list of papers authored/co-authored by her if anybody wants to check.

By any measure the above is an outstanding record in mathematics scholarship. Nobody is claiming that she is the second coming of Euler/Gauss but in her own way she has achieved and done much in and for mathematics.

She chose to work on the popularization of mathematics and has done an excellent job of it in recognition of which the "International Mathematical Union" awarded the "Leelavati Prize" to her for outstanding contributions for increasing public awareness of mathematics as an intellectual discipline and the crucial role it plays in diverse human endeavors...[and]...outstanding public outreach work for mathematics. (https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/leelavati-prize)

Given how Modern Science and Mathematics feels like sheer "magic" to the common man (because they are not well explained and hence hard to understand) we need more people like Hannah who work on explaining/popularizing them; the main reason that Cambridge/Oxford/Other universities are establishing chairs for these disciplines. I would argue that this is the need of the hour for all scientific disciplines now.

PS: The Leelavati Prize 2026: A conversation with Hannah Fry - https://plus.maths.org/leelavati-prize-2026-conversation-wit...

Re: Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach

#112
post #98
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually have a worse impression of her now You’re not exactly making the best impression here. This is such a bizarre thread. You have nit-picked someone’s choice of words into an extraordinary series of implicit slights against someone who has won a prize for the very thing at which she excels, and you really are inviting a lot of theories as to why; very few of them favourable.

[flagged]

> There are also other arguments that I made that have not been addressed as far as I can tell.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057187

Re: Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach

#114
post #66
post #60

Anyone else here still follow her advice about how to quickly evict all the hot air in your car on a summer's day?

No, but now I really want to know what the advice is! Can you share it?

"Cooling down a hot car - with science" https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=oKRcbRGDC6U>

Re: Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach

#115
post #27

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!

Seems to happen to most top universities, or is there some context I'm missing?

People who graduate top universities can walk into any job they want.

Top universities hiring professors can pick any they want.

But also discovering a passion for academia can occur at any institution, reaching the pinnacle of the career is an enormous commitment.

Re: Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach

#116
post #13

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

Her youtube shorts are also good bite-sized explainers. The one on why "ghost" traffic jams occur was illuminating.
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