Hannah Fry

Why organisations work with Hannah Fry

• Hello World (2018) advances a specific governance argument: that AI fails not because the technology is wrong, but because accountability was poorly designed. That gives boards a working framework for AI governance, not just a sharper awareness of risk.
• Her UCL research was applied directly – she worked with governments, police forces, health analysts, and supermarkets, translating mathematical models of human behaviour into operational decisions. That applied track record is what separates her algorithmic analysis from academic commentary.
• The accuracy-versus-fairness trade-off in predictive systems is a mathematical problem before it is an ethical one. She can explain it precisely enough for legal, compliance, and strategy leaders to translate it into governance decisions – not just for data teams.
• She holds Cambridge’s inaugural Professorship in the Public Understanding of Mathematics – a chair that formalises the argument that making quantitative thinking accessible to non-specialists is itself a research discipline.
• As President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, her institutional credibility extends well beyond media profile.

Biography highlights

• First Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (from January 2025), joining the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
• Previously Professor in the Mathematics of Cities at UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis; research applied to urban crime, transport, health analysis, and terrorism, with direct advisory roles across government and industry
• Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (elected 2022) and Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge
• President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications
• Author of Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine (2018) – winner of the 2020 Asimov Prize; shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Royal Society Science Book Prize
• Christopher Zeeman Medal (2018) and Royal Society David Attenborough Award (2024) for contributions to science communication
• Delivered the 2019 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures – only the fourth mathematician to do so since Michael Faraday established the series in 1825
• BBC presenter across AI Confidential with Hannah Fry (2026), The Secret Genius of Modern Life (BBC Two), and Bloomberg Originals’ The Future with Hannah Fry (2023); regular contributor to The New Yorker; TED Talk “The Mathematics of Love” has exceeded five million views

Biography

Hannah Fry spent over a decade at UCL studying the mathematics of cities – how people move through urban space, where crime clusters, how disease propagates through populations. Her research was applied: she worked directly with governments, police forces, health analysts, and supermarkets. The question she returned to consistently was what happens when those decisions are automated, and whether the automation can be trusted.

Her book Hello World (2018) answered that question with precision. Algorithms are not objective – they encode the biases embedded in the data they were trained on, often before anyone noticed. The response, she argued, is not to distrust AI but to design governance that keeps humans genuinely in the loop. She called this the “cyborg future” – a practical framework for accountability, not a metaphor. The book won the 2020 Asimov Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Royal Society Science Book Prize.

In January 2025, she became Cambridge’s first Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics, following in the footsteps of David Spiegelhalter and Stephen Hawking as a public interpreter of the discipline. She also serves as President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and holds a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Her media work extends the argument across audiences that no academic publication reaches. BBC Two’s AI Confidential with Hannah Fry (2026) investigated how AI is reshaping human relationships and institutional decisions. The Secret Genius of Modern Life ran over two BBC Two series. She delivered the 2019 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures – only the fourth mathematician in the lectures’ 200-year history to do so – and writes regularly for The New Yorker. For leadership teams moving from AI adoption to AI accountability, that combination of mathematical rigour and public clarity is not a communications asset. It is the substance of what she brings.

Key speaking topics

• AI and algorithmic decision-making
• Data bias and algorithmic fairness
• Human-machine governance
• Risk and probability in complex systems
• The mathematics of human behaviour
• Urban data and city systems
• Science communication and mathematical literacy

Ideal for

• Executive and board-level audiences setting AI governance and risk policy
• Chief Data Officers, Chief Technology Officers, and senior technology strategy teams
• Leadership conferences addressing responsible AI adoption in regulated industries – healthcare, financial services, criminal justice
• Public sector audiences navigating the use of predictive and automated systems

Audience outcomes

• A clearer understanding of how algorithmic bias is produced and why it is mathematically difficult to eliminate without deliberate trade-offs
• A practical mental model – drawn from the Hello World framework – for when to trust algorithmic output and when to retain human judgment
• Confidence to engage substantively with AI governance questions without requiring deep technical knowledge
• Greater ability to interrogate the assumptions behind data-driven outputs, rather than treating them as authoritative
• A vocabulary for discussing AI risk that is precise and usable in board-level and policy conversations