Cross Section: Hannah Fry – Science Weekly podcast

Dr Hannah Fry won the Christopher Zeeman medal in August for her contributions to the public understanding of the mathematical sciences. Ian Sample has invited her on the podcast to discuss her love of numbers. Plus, he asks, can we really use this discipline to predict human behaviour?

Maths probably isn't something you're thinking about in the build-up to the new year. If anything, it's the nth thing on your mind, where n equals a centillion. But for UCL's Dr Hannah Fry, mathematics is often at the forefront of her thinking. For instance, she's worked out whether Santa would get fatter from eating all the mince pies, or thinner, from having to shimmy up and down chimneys all night long. She's thought about how game theory could help you beat your uncle at monopoly, and even the optimal length of tinsel you should have used on your Christmas tree.

Increasingly, though, Fry's research focuses on whether we can use maths, coding and modelling to predict human behaviour. This year, she won the Christopher Zeeman medal for her contributions to the public understanding of the mathematical sciences, so Ian Sample invited her on the podcast to discuss her love of numbers. Plus, he asks, can we really use this discipline to model and predict human behaviour?