Cummings’ Whitehall weirdos will need to understand people, not just numbers | Hannah Fry

Boris Johnson's adviser wants more maths geniuses in the civil service. But real life is too messy to be boiled down to equations

About 10 years ago I had a conversation with a civil servant about Britain's chemical decontamination units. He was in charge of calculating where in the country the government should keep them. These giant trucks had specialist equipment that could respond quickly if there was an anthrax attack or similar on our shores. But at the time there was only a small number of them, so they needed careful positioning to ensure they could reach as much of the country as quickly as possible in an emergency.

It's a decision that boils down to maths. It's not an easy thing to work out either. It was a problem that I, as a mathematician, imagined had a number of top minds working to solve. Picture my astonishment, then, when I discovered that rather than some beautifully crafted numerical model, or some sophisticated custom-built software, the British government had left a question of such magnitude to one poor guy, working it out on his own. He was using an Excel spreadsheet. And we were having the conversation because his spreadsheet kept crashing.