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I have no idea why you have this weird axe to grind. Yes she has done research https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01303 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01

I have no idea why you have this weird axe to grind. Yes she has done research https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01303 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01303 https://www.thelancet.com/article/S1473-3099(20)30457-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/article/S1473-3099(20)30457-6/full... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03164-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03164-7 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.16.20023754v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.16.20023754v... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-applied-mathematics/article/abs/spatiotemporal-patterns-of-ied-usage-by-the-provisional-irish-republican-army/3BC0D8552313F1BC893D5F6519079BB8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-... Etc etc. That’s papers in Nature, The Lancet, The European Journal of Applied Mathematics etc. If you actually searched you would have found tons and tons of papers and citations. She clearly does “hardcore” research by any reasonable definition as you would expect given she has been for some time a professor at UCL which is a top-tier university.

dofm 3mo ago
Between 2017 and 2021 she also had two children, cervical cancer, a radical hysterectomy, lymphoedema and reconstructive surgery for that. She is a properly impressive person who warrants no shade, but it never surprises me to see it.
- hunnovi 3mo ago
  There are examples like Stephen Hawking, and he did truly impressive work in hardcore science as far as I know, despite the challenges and obstacles that he had in life. Hannah Fry has done a lot of soft work, lots of books and other media, lots of activity, a very hardworking person, and very skilled at popularity work. But that does not change my impression that her focus is not really on hardcore science.
- globular-toast 3mo ago
  I guess she's no Richard Feynman, just like literally everyone else on the planet...
hunnovi 3mo ago
[flagged]
- dofm 3mo ago
  > I actually have a worse impression of her now You’re not exactly making the best impression here. This is such a bizarre thread. You have nit-picked someone’s choice of words into an extraordinary series of implicit slights against someone who has won a prize for the very thing at which she excels, and you really are inviting a lot of theories as to why; very few of them favourable.
  - hunnovi 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - rramadass 3mo ago
      > There are also other arguments that I made that have not been addressed as far as I can tell. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057187
- rramadass 3mo ago
  What a small-minded, mean-spirited, charlatan and poser you are! Having gone through all your comments in this thread, it is clear that you are just an "anonymous coward" and a troll, deriding and denigrating other folks commendable life work for no reason at all. Instead of hiding behind anonymity, why don't you share your qualifications and competencies with us so that we can judge for ourselves on what basis you made the above statements and what they are worth? Do you have the spine to stand behind your criticisms in real life? Your criticisms above are just general "shade-throwing and innuendos" with nothing specific to them. Preprints have far greater readership (and hence are a form of informal peer review) than official journals due to lack of paywall restrictions. The position of an author's name in a paper does not always reflect the magnitude of their contribution to it. Often it is just alphabetical, seniority-based (i.e. age), in-group vs. out-group or simply first-come first-noted. Your comments about statistics are laughable. Do you even know what you are talking about? Probability/Statistics are fundamental to Hannah's work. Contrary to what you may think many do check/verify the data which they study in a paper (it is trivial with Computers/AI nowadays). Pointing to reproducibility crisis/scandals simply implies that you have nothing worthwhile to contribute but are simply "throwing shade" for the sake of it (which any fool can do). Hannah Fry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Fry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Fry) has a PhD from UCL for research on fluid dynamics and the Navier–Stokes equations. Do you know how hardcore a domain that is in Applied Mathematics/Physics? She then became lecturer/professor at "UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCL_Centre_for_Advanced_Spatial_Analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCL_Centre_for_Advanced_Spatia... Do you have any idea of what they do? She then was made a "Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering" and then became President of the "Institute of Mathematics and its Applications". All before finally joining Cambridge as the university's first "Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics". Google Scholar will show one the list of papers authored/co-authored by her if anybody wants to check. By any measure the above is an outstanding record in mathematics scholarship. Nobody is claiming that she is the second coming of Euler/Gauss but in her own way she has achieved and done much in and for mathematics. She chose to work on the popularization of mathematics and has done an excellent job of it in recognition of which the "International Mathematical Union" awarded the "Leelavati Prize" to her for outstanding contributions for increasing public awareness of mathematics as an intellectual discipline and the crucial role it plays in diverse human endeavors...[and]...outstanding public outreach work for mathematics. (https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/leelavati-prize https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/leelavati-prize) Given how Modern Science and Mathematics feels like sheer "magic" to the common man (because they are not well explained and hence hard to understand) we need more people like Hannah who work on explaining/popularizing them; the main reason that Cambridge/Oxford/Other universities are establishing chairs for these disciplines. I would argue that this is the need of the hour for all scientific disciplines now. PS: The Leelavati Prize 2026: A conversation with Hannah Fry - https://plus.maths.org/leelavati-prize-2026-conversation-withhannah-fry https://plus.maths.org/leelavati-prize-2026-conversation-wit...

dofm 3mo ago

Between 2017 and 2021 she also had two children, cervical cancer, a radical hysterectomy, lymphoedema and reconstructive surgery for that. She is a properly impressive person who warrants no shade, but it never surprises me to see it.

hunnovi 3mo ago
There are examples like Stephen Hawking, and he did truly impressive work in hardcore science as far as I know, despite the challenges and obstacles that he had in life. Hannah Fry has done a lot of soft work, lots of books and other media, lots of activity, a very hardworking person, and very skilled at popularity work. But that does not change my impression that her focus is not really on hardcore science.
globular-toast 3mo ago
I guess she's no Richard Feynman, just like literally everyone else on the planet...

hunnovi 3mo ago

[flagged]

dofm 3mo ago
> I actually have a worse impression of her now You’re not exactly making the best impression here. This is such a bizarre thread. You have nit-picked someone’s choice of words into an extraordinary series of implicit slights against someone who has won a prize for the very thing at which she excels, and you really are inviting a lot of theories as to why; very few of them favourable.
- hunnovi 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - rramadass 3mo ago
    > There are also other arguments that I made that have not been addressed as far as I can tell. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057187
rramadass 3mo ago
What a small-minded, mean-spirited, charlatan and poser you are! Having gone through all your comments in this thread, it is clear that you are just an "anonymous coward" and a troll, deriding and denigrating other folks commendable life work for no reason at all. Instead of hiding behind anonymity, why don't you share your qualifications and competencies with us so that we can judge for ourselves on what basis you made the above statements and what they are worth? Do you have the spine to stand behind your criticisms in real life? Your criticisms above are just general "shade-throwing and innuendos" with nothing specific to them. Preprints have far greater readership (and hence are a form of informal peer review) than official journals due to lack of paywall restrictions. The position of an author's name in a paper does not always reflect the magnitude of their contribution to it. Often it is just alphabetical, seniority-based (i.e. age), in-group vs. out-group or simply first-come first-noted. Your comments about statistics are laughable. Do you even know what you are talking about? Probability/Statistics are fundamental to Hannah's work. Contrary to what you may think many do check/verify the data which they study in a paper (it is trivial with Computers/AI nowadays). Pointing to reproducibility crisis/scandals simply implies that you have nothing worthwhile to contribute but are simply "throwing shade" for the sake of it (which any fool can do). Hannah Fry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Fry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Fry) has a PhD from UCL for research on fluid dynamics and the Navier–Stokes equations. Do you know how hardcore a domain that is in Applied Mathematics/Physics? She then became lecturer/professor at "UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCL_Centre_for_Advanced_Spatial_Analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCL_Centre_for_Advanced_Spatia... Do you have any idea of what they do? She then was made a "Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering" and then became President of the "Institute of Mathematics and its Applications". All before finally joining Cambridge as the university's first "Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics". Google Scholar will show one the list of papers authored/co-authored by her if anybody wants to check. By any measure the above is an outstanding record in mathematics scholarship. Nobody is claiming that she is the second coming of Euler/Gauss but in her own way she has achieved and done much in and for mathematics. She chose to work on the popularization of mathematics and has done an excellent job of it in recognition of which the "International Mathematical Union" awarded the "Leelavati Prize" to her for outstanding contributions for increasing public awareness of mathematics as an intellectual discipline and the crucial role it plays in diverse human endeavors...[and]...outstanding public outreach work for mathematics. (https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/leelavati-prize https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/leelavati-prize) Given how Modern Science and Mathematics feels like sheer "magic" to the common man (because they are not well explained and hence hard to understand) we need more people like Hannah who work on explaining/popularizing them; the main reason that Cambridge/Oxford/Other universities are establishing chairs for these disciplines. I would argue that this is the need of the hour for all scientific disciplines now. PS: The Leelavati Prize 2026: A conversation with Hannah Fry - https://plus.maths.org/leelavati-prize-2026-conversation-withhannah-fry https://plus.maths.org/leelavati-prize-2026-conversation-wit...