The teacher you wished you’d had: the electric rise of Hannah Fry

Hannah Fry is “surely the UK’s leading populariser of science”, said The i Paper. Recently named co-host of “The Rest is Science”, the latest podcast in Gary Lineker’s hit The Rest Is… franchise, Fry is a “natural communicator” with a “winning fusion of darting intelligence, sly humour, electric enthusiasm and a touch of cheerful glamour”.

The maths professor is “like the teacher you wish you’d had” – someone who makes “challenging subjects feel like shared adventures”.

‘Goody two shoes’

Growing up in a working-class family in Hertfordshire, with a factory worker father and her housewife mother, “I wasn’t really going out”, dating, drinking, or “hanging out in the park at ill-advised hours”, Fry told The i Paper. Instead, I was “learning how to do Rubik’s Cubes”, juggle and “genuinely just reading”.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“My whole life I’ve been a goody two shoes,” she told The Guardian. No detentions, no breaking the law. My worst habit is being “consistently and reliably late for everything. I strongly suspect it’s because I’m very optimistic – I think I can get ready quicker than I ever can.”

When she arrived at UCL to study mathematics, Fry was “one of the people who grew up in the countryside and whose parents were really strict and they Lose. Their. Minds”, said The i Paper. She tried stand-up comedy at university, then studied for a PhD in fluid dynamics so that she could work in Formula 1. But she found the motor racing industry “awful” and broke into broadcasting through a TED talk on the mathematics of love.

‘Electric enthusiasm’

When she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2021 at the age of 36, she opted for a radical hysterectomy. The strain “precipitated the amicable end of her marriage”, but she “dealt with it all by intimately tracking” the experience in a BBC Two documentary, “Making Sense of Cancer with Hannah Fry”. She’s also written a book: “Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine”.

She is a regular guest host on “Have I Got News for You” and co-hosts BBC Radio 4’s “Curious Cases” podcast with comedian Dara Ó Briain. In her National Geographic TV series “The Infinite Explorer”, Fry visits countries all over the world – it was “the chance of a lifetime”, she told Metro. She was recently appointed the University of Cambridge’s first professor of the public understanding of mathematics.

There have been mixed reviews for her performance on “The Rest Is Science”. Fry’s “fact-filled banter needs structure”, said The Times, whereas The Telegraph thought the opening episode was “a delight”.