Prof Hannah Fry is many things – mathematician, author, presenter, podcaster, a trusted expert in many fields – but one thing she is not is a foodie. She was going to suggest a kebab shop for lunch. “I wanted a filthy doner grot-fest,” she says, but opted for Nando’s instead. “I wanted the world to know that I was a classy girl.” You know what you’re getting with a Nando’s, she reasons, as the lunch rush heaves around us. Slightly bashfully, she says yes, she does have a regular order: chicken, chips and slaw. “I was tempted to go for the lemon and herb, just so everyone would know I was a massive wimp,” she admits. “I’ll have medium. It is lunchtime.”
Fry, 39, was born in Essex, and grew up just over the Hertfordshire border, in Hoddesdon, near Harlow, the middle child of three sisters. Her mother is Irish. “I don’t know whether this is uniform across all of Ireland, but certainly, my family are not culinary experts.” Take Christmas, for example. “In the Irish family, there will be roast potato, mashed potato, boiled potatoes. Maybe hash browns and croquettes. That’s what I like to call the Irish mixed grill,” she jokes.
Anyone who listens to her podcasts, watches her on YouTube or has seen her on the BBC, talking with pure glee about, say, the technology that goes into a bank card, will know that she is very funny. Part of her appeal is that she can deliver dense information in an easy, gossipy, can-you-believe-how-amazing-this-is way. Take boiled food. She hasn’t made a documentary about it yet, but I wonder if she should. Whenever she goes to Ireland, she mostly eats boiled ham and boiled potatoes. “But I don’t mean, boil it and make sure it’s cooked perfectly. Just, boil the living shit out of it and then eventually it will be edible.” She knows what happens when you boil the unboilable. “My mum wasn’t particularly focused on being good at cooking, so she’d go to the reduced aisle at Sainsbury’s, buy whatever was there, and just bring it home and boil it. Sardines. Boiled sardines. And they were already a bit peaky, because they were in the reduced aisle. Me and my sisters, none of us will touch anything that has lived in water.”
In the past, Fry has described herself as “very working class”. Her father made hydraulic lifts for lorries, while her mother pushed her interest in numbers. “She wasn’t pushing me to make me something. She was pushing me because she’s Catholic, and life is pain.” She and her older sister were the first in the family to go to university. Lately, she has been thinking about class again. “There are strange gaps in my knowledge,” she says. “Like, you’re in the halls of Radio 4, and someone will go, ‘Lol, joke in Latin’ or something. And I’ve got no idea. My family are not, by any stretch of the imagination, unintelligent. I think my dad would wipe the floor with a lot of maths professors I have met.” She talks about finding herself in a conversation with the likes of Bill Gates. “Or you’re on Question Time, and you have to readjust your view of yourself. It’s not so much imposter syndrome, because it’s not that I necessarily doubt my ability. It’s just very alien, and everyone else knows what to do. And you have to learn.”
The food arrives and we move on to breezier topics, such as cancer, the end of her marriage, and the dystopian horrors of large language models and what ChatGPT might be about to unleash on the world. (“Maybe don’t scare your readers,” she says, almost cheerfully, after scaring the life out of me.) Just a few light questions over Nando’s. “Yeah, thank you,” she says, drily. “Do you want a peri chip?”
Fry walked here from a venue just up the road where she was giving a talk about cancer. At the beginning of 2021, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and she documented the experience in an intimate and thoughtful film for the BBC’s Horizon. She filmed herself talking to doctors on the phone, and in hospital, preparing for a radical hysterectomy, and captured the moment she told her husband she had been given the all clear. The film also sensitively explored the issue of informed consent around cancer treatment in the UK, and what statistics mean to those who are presented with them under terrifying circumstances. “I think that people feel very uncomfortable about uncertainty. If you are someone who understands uncertainty and is capable of talking about this stuff, then I do feel a bit more responsibility, on that side. It was an important conversation that we needed to have.”
Since the film aired, she and her husband have split up. They have two daughters, who are six and three. “We’re co-parenting, he lives really close to me, we’re really good friends,” she says.
Tell me if this is too intrusive … “I was just on stage, talking about my fanny,” she quips … but does she think that having cancer made her reevaluate her life, and think, hang on, I want to live a bit differently?
“Definitely. I think there’s a version of the world where I could have carried on exactly as I was before, and been like, this is my lot, that’s fine.” In 2014, she rose to prominence with a Ted Talk, and subsequent book, on the mathematics of love; on brand, she brings the question back to data. “If you look at the data for arranged marriages, actually, people in arranged marriages tend to be happier than people who are not.” But she found that she no longer wanted to carry on exactly as she had before. “I was just like, you know what, I want more. Or maybe I just want different. Maybe I’m just having a midlife crisis. I don’t know. It’s quite possible,” she laughs.
Cancer, she says, is a bit like being slapped around the face. “I was lucky. By the time it had happened, it was over. But then you’re left reeling from it, for ages and ages afterwards.” She started to pierce her ears. She kept going back to the same place, week after week, getting more and more piercings. I love the idea of her bank checking her statement … “And going, what is wrong? Are you OK?”
Maybe it’s time to update the Ted Talk? “Maybe,” she says. “One thing I can definitely say is, holy shit, stuff has changed since I was last single.” She has been on the dating apps. “I got banned from Hinge because someone thought I was pretending to be me,” she chuckles. She acknowledges that there are positives to this new romantic landscape. It is easier to meet people, she reasons, but it also feels more disposable, more like shopping. “I think dating apps have had as profound an impact on relationships as the Facebook newsfeed has had on misinformation.” How so? “There are things like the decline of monogamy. All sorts of things are shifting, because we’ve said to this private corporation, you’re in charge of that aspect of our lives, and I don’t think we’ve really thought through the wider implications of that.” She laughs. “I mean, look, don’t get me wrong. I remember going into Yates’ wine bar in Leicester Square when I was 19, hanging around hoping somebody would buy you a drink. That’s not exactly ideal, either.”
Until recently, Fry would have called herself a maths professor who did TV and radio on the side. “In the past year, it’s switched around. I think my side hustle is being a professor of mathematics.” She remains on staff at UCL, where she is a professor in the mathematics of cities and still teaches postgraduate students, but she has reduced her hours, in part because she may have to nip over the the US to film a documentary, or appear on Kelly Clarkson’s chat show. She advises the government on data, writes books, tells 6 Music listeners about the wonders of science, hosts a web series for Bloomberg called The Future, exploring nuclear fusion, rewilding the planet and whether machines can recognise human emotions, and presents TV series on subjects as varied as trainers and vaccine hesitancy (she still gets regular abusive messages about that one) and whether it might be possible to live to 150 one day. Her films often veer off into more philosophical concerns. After watching her cancer documentary, I found myself thinking about what it means to live a good life, rather than a long one.
“That’s totally deliberate and intentional,” she nods. “I’m not doing this because I think everybody should be a mathematician, because I don’t. I am fully comfortable with the fact that lots of people have serious anxiety about this subject.” Instead, she wants to offer people the chance to see the world differently. “People focus quite a lot on, ‘Do you know how to solve a quadratic equation?’ And actually, the really important skills are about critical thinking and looking at something and deciding whether it makes sense or not. I don’t think you need to be particularly numerate for that.”
Fry has serious ambitions for her life. “This sounds really grand, but this is genuinely true. I would like to leave the world better than I found it.” She is working towards that. But, she adds, she also just loves telling stories, whether they’re about the weaponisation of data, fitness trackers, or eels. She smiles. “Almost always, if I’m talking about something, it’s because I think it’s really cool.”
The Future With Hannah Fry is available now on Bloomberg
