Instant Genius - Hannah Fry: How much of our lives is secretly underpinned by maths?

Episode Date: December 26, 2019

Hopefully by now the last crumbs of mince pie will be wiped clean and Grandad has woken up from his Christmas day nap. If you’re anything like us, that period between Christmas and New Year means only one thing – lazing in front of the TV and watching the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. This institution has been sharing the wonders of science and entertaining children and adults alike for generations, and this year’s host hopes this year will be no different. Our editorial assistant Amy Barret sat down with Hannah Fry, only the fourth mathematician to deliver one of the lectures, who’ll be showing the audience how maths secretly underpins much of the world around us in her lecture series called Secrets and Lies, broadcast on BBC Four on 26-28 December at 20:00. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Aoife McLysaght: What makes me 'me'? Adam Kay: Is Christmas really the most wonderful time of the year on labour ward? Chris Lintott: Can members of the public do real science? Jim Al-Khalili: Why should we care about science and scientists? Robert Elliott Smith: Are algorithms inherently biased? Hannah Fry: What's the deal with algorithms? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Study And play.

Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium

and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.S. College PC. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home.

Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. The problem is with maths is that you can't see it, you can't hold it, you can't point to it and say that's what it is. It's completely invisible. And so it's really easy to turn a blind eye to just how pervasive it is, to just how much of our modern world completely relies on it, is built on its foundations. And when you start looking for it, I've yet to find a single thing about humans or about

physical things or about our universe or anything where math has nothing to say. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print, and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello everyone, I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus. And hopefully by now, the last crumbs of mince pie will be wiped clean and granddad has woken up from his Christmas day nap. If you're anything like us, that period between Christmas and New Year means only one thing, lazing in front of the TV and watching the Royal Institution Christmas Letchers.

This institution has been sharing the wonders of science and entertaining children and adults alike for generations, and this year's host hopes that this year will be no different. Our editorial assistant Amy Barrett sat down with Hannah Fry, only the fourth mathematician to deliver one of the lectures, who'll be showing the audience how math secretly underpins much of the world around us in her lecture series called Secrets and Lies. My name is Hannah Fry. I am a mathematician and I study patterns in human behavior. So this year you're going to be presenting the loved, much love, much love, and much watched Christmas lectures.

Certainly am. What are the lectures? And for anyone who hasn't watched them before, why should they? Oh, okay, good question. All right. So these lectures have been going since 1825. And back then, as I understand it, Faraday, the guy who discovered electricity, and a few of his mates decided that they wanted to impart their wisdom of science.

on to local children. So, I mean, I haven't looked into this very much, but the idea of my mind is that they grab loads of Victorian children off the street, made them sit there and then just talk science at them for an hour for several nights in a row. That's kind of my understanding of it. But since about the 1950s or 60s, these lectures have been televised. On the BBC, they were also then for a while on Channel 4, now back on the BBC. and they're broadly supposed to be a place where real experts, real scientists, real mathematicians

can have a chance to explain why their subject is so exciting, why they love their subject so much, why they're so passionate about it, but to do so in a way that appeals to all generations. So everyone from 11 up to, you know, 75 and over, and do so in a way that includes big, gigantic demonstrations. and experiments, loads of audience interaction, and just a really kind of friendly but intriguing and thought-provoking addition to your Christmas holidays. What will your lectures be about this year? Well, so in all of that time, they have only let three mathematicians previously do the lectures, which thing is astonishing, right?

Almost 200 years, only three previous times have there been mathematicians. So I make the fourth occasion. Correct. just checking. I make the fourth, the four time round. But I'm not going to do maths in the way that you might have seen it before. I'm not going to do loads of things about prime numbers or geometry or a bit of algebra, you know, none of that stuff.

The lectures this year, they're called Secrets and Lies. And really, it's about how many aspects of our lives. as people are secretly underpinned by mathematics. So, you know, for instance, in the first lecture, which is all about chance and randomness and luck, we're going to be talking to someone from the Premier League who analyzes how players act on the pitch and how you can use maths in that situation,

maths and data and statistics to actually make your own luck to give your team a better chance of winning. And in the second lecture, we're going to be talking about how to use all the knowledge that we have of mathematics to be able to kind of bend the world to our will. We're going to be talking about how you can make a computer help to diagnose cancer, but also using a process that you can teach to a pigeon. So we're going to be talking about pigeons diagnosing cancer. I mean, standard stuff. Standard, standard Christmas fodder. But then in the third lecture, really, we're talking about what the limits of that are.

So how much we want to entrust decisions in our world to mathematics and to these kind of mathematical algorithms that are so pervasive that are everywhere. So in that lecture, we're going to be having an audience member. We're going to do a deep fake on an audience member. So I think this is the first time that anyone's done it on television. we're going to take an audience member and then do a live, deep fake of them in a whole host of extraordinary environments.

So what is the deep fake? Ah, deep fake. Okay, so deep fake is where... I mean, it's quite easy to get like an impressionist to fake a piece of audio from a famous person, to have a famous person sound like they're saying something that they're not. Or, you know, if you're a bad singer,

to use autotune to make you sound like a better singer, there's you know i guess various arguments as to whether that's faking or not um but audio is something that's quite easy to fake right you could you can make people sound like they're saying stuff they're not really saying likewise photographs are very easy to fake so you know photoshopping things in and out deep fakes are where you do the same but to video footage so there's some very clever and sophisticated mathematical techniques behind this that aren't totally dissimilar to the filters that you get on Instagram or Snapchat that sort of change your face into a rabbit or whatever.

It's kind of like that sort of stuff. But instead of changing your face into a rabbit, you can change your face into somebody else's, which means that, yeah, I can sit here and say some nonsense sentence. Like, I don't know, give me all your jelly babies, right? But instead of me saying it, you could effectively make it look as though Tom Cruise saying it, right? So you can, you can, you can make a video where Tom Cruise is saying

anything and doing anything that you want him to be saying or doing. And there's maths in that. Yeah, I mean, the whole process of transcribing what's going on in those pixels, how the fate is moving, working out what's actually going on behind this, you know, what that means in terms of a 3D object, i.e. your face and instead replacing it with somebody else's face it's incredibly mathematical. I mean it's all mathematical but I think that this is a really good example of where it's not just a mathematical process that kind of sits in like

you know pop it in a textbook and you're done this is something that has much wider in potential implications for the world because as soon as you can fake video using these kind of very simple these mathematical techniques. It's not just that you could make anyone look like they're doing anything. Of course you can do that. But where it really comes into play is that we might end up in a situation where nobody knows what's real and what's fake anymore.

And you have people denying real footage claiming that it's fake when it isn't necessarily. That's, I think, the big implication of all of this stuff is that it's not just this little bit of clever maths. It's something that has the ability to just puncture all truth and reality and everything that we know to be real at the moment within the world. Wow. And it's not anything that you'd kind of assume maths could do. It's like when I think about mass of me, I think about my GCSE subject, which was quite dry in comparison to what you're saying.

A few fractions, bit percentages, couple of circle theorems. I think the quadratic formula is sort of like embedded in my brain now. But is there something, you know, about the way that we teach maths, that is maybe missing out on these really interesting, exciting examples of real life. I mean, so yes and no. I think that the analogy that often gets used is that the maths that you get taught in school, it's like being taught music by only ever playing scales and never, never, never listening to any other music.

That's all you know of. That's all you know exists. And if your only experience of music with scales, you would think, what is the point of music? And yet, ask anyone who's alive and they know what the point of music is. And so I think it is, in a way, a real shame that that's the way that math is taught. You know, it's so blinkered and so focused and just misses out on just this incredible wealth, this incredible sort of extra mirrored universe that exists.

like our universe, but just slightly more mathematical, that's kind of sitting underneath us. You can't see any of that when you're doing maths in school. But I also think that it's sort of the way that it needs to be, you know. I wish it wasn't, but you do have to learn, when you're learning the piano, you've got to learn the scales, right? You have to. And it's boring. No one enjoys it, but you have to.

Otherwise you won't be able to do those things in the end. So that's the reason why I think things. like the Christmas lectures and things like, you know, work that lots of other science and mass communicators are doing in making these stories, these incredible and surprising and counterintuitive stories, making them known to the wider public because you sort of, it's like having musicians, right? There's stretching this analogy quite far now. I consider myself a musician.

But it's like it's those two arms of something. You get your scales in school, but you need to step outside and have something like the Christmas lectures to really show you the actual power and potential of the subject. And you're, you know, you are a very experienced maths communicator, science communicator. How is presenting the lectures going to differ from your previous experience in that sort of field? Oh, good question. I have a lot more control over these. Oh, okay.

A control in content. In terms of the style. In terms of the actual words that come out of my mouth. Because ultimately, when you do TV, I mean, there's a lot of people. There's a lot of people who have to be part of a team to make a television program. And so inevitably, it's really hard to get your... vision across, right? I mean, you know, if there's a, if there's a TV program and someone says, oh, well done for that TV program, I often can't claim very much credit for it because

because the, the topics are, as much as I might try and have an input into it, I'm not in control of the research process, of the script writing process. I have input all the way along, but, you know, it's input, whereas here it's the other way around, right? These are my lectures and people helping me with these lectures. And so what that means is that I can just paint them more in the image of how I think mass communication should be rather than the way that it's always been. Because I think the way that mass communication has always been has like followed that pattern of in school, right? It's like, hey, root two is an irrational number. Is not exciting? It's like, well, I struggle to get excited about that. I'm a professional mathematician,

and I struggle to get excited about that. Or by using loads of awe and wonder. And using the same tricks that you would if you were making physics programs. And of course you can use awe and wonder because the universe is awesome and wonderful. But, you know, there's only so much awe and wonder in prime numbers, right?

Or triangles. Like there's only so much awe and wonder in triangles. So I think with these lectures, what I'm able to do with them is make them much more about people, which is the bit that I care about the most, is about what maths can tell us about ourselves. And I think that in terms of the style of them,

they could be just much more playful, much more charismatic, much more irreverent, just not take itself too seriously the whole way along. And I think that's the thing I'm most looking forward to. And you've talked a little bit about how kind of mass underpins most of what we do on a daily basis. So, you know, say my regular weekday, where do I interact mass going through my day? Oh, well. Okay, all right. So you get up. Maybe you turn on your radio, using a mobile phone perhaps, which is communicating with satellites to get

those sound waves to your phone. I mean, all the way along that process. of switching on the radio and listening to it on your phone. There's just math, math, math, math. I mean, it's math all the way down, basically. Pixers on your screen, how those are designed. Just, I mean, it's everywhere. I mean, that whole process. It's quite a physical process, right?

Quite sciencey. But, you know, let's say then you go and you maybe get the train to work. All those train timetables, that is math, math, math, math, math, math, all the way down, the whole way through. you know, maybe you are putting on a nice new jacket as you leave the house. The way that those patterns, the way that someone transformed a flat piece of fabric into a structure around your body that fits uniquely and can be scaled up and scaled down, depending on the size of the person that's wearing it. That's maths, maths, maths, maths, maths, all the way down. I haven't even gotten to any people he stuff yet, right?

I haven't even done anything yet. I've done anything, you just got dressed and got on the train. I think it's just the problem is with maths is that you can't see it, you can't hold it, you can't point to it and say that's what it is. It's completely invisible. And so it's really easy to turn a blind eye to just how pervasive it is, to just how much of our modern world completely relies on it, is built on its foundations. and when you start looking for it, I mean, I've kind of said this before in different talks that I've given, but I think when you start looking for it, I've yet to find a single thing about humans or about physical things

or about our universe or anything where math has nothing to say, where math can't offer us at least some fresh perspective on how to look at things. And you talk about turning a blind eye to it. that kind of can be quite a bad thing for us as well because we don't realize how much, you know, we're giving away to computers and we've talked about algorithms slightly that you've mentioned them in the lectures. The fact that we do not understand how much of ourselves is being sort of collected and then analysed in this mathematical way can be a danger, can't it? Yeah, totally. I mean, I think Cambridge Analytica hit us all quite hard, right?

we hadn't realised just what the implications of what we were doing. I mean, and that's an example of where it's, the thing about came in an analytical is they really weren't unusual. They weren't, they weren't a group of people who were doing something really incredible. They were a group of people who were using the system in the way that it had been designed in the sense that so much of, everything that's around us now is designed to analyze us, to collect our data, to work out what we're going to do next and to use that information, either to sell us something or to improve something. I mean, this is for both good and bad, right? It's not just universally negative. But yeah, and I think you're right that it is very easy to turn the blind eye to that.

And have you found that the more work you've done in this area, the more conscious you've become of when you give your own personal data? Like, I mean, would you download a free app on your phone? Do you find yourself thinking twice about it? So yes and no. So I have ad blockers and I have lots of different email addresses with like nonsense names that you wouldn't know, it was whatever and all of that stuff. So I try and like maintain a level of anonymity.

And avoid it, you know, always say no to cookies, always go through and tick no partners, whatever. And also tend to try and stick more in the Apple world than the Google world because they have a much better record on privacy. And they're kind of using privacy almost as a marketing tool now, which I really like. But on the flip side, I mean, if it's half 12 at night, you just want to read something on a website,

and it pops up and says, do you accept the cookies, it's, oh, for God, take it. I think it's the same as everyone. Well, I mean, forgive me, but I don't really know what I'm agreeing to when I took that box. You're agreeing to being tracked, basically. Right, by anyone or? Pretty much, yeah. So the way that it works is that there are data brokers who deal and trade in your data.

So there was a big report that came out. in America a couple of years ago now, that looked into data brokers and how much information they have on people. And it was made for quite interesting reading. So, I mean, I think it's pretty fair to say as a fact that somewhere on a server somewhere, there will be a file with your name on it. Might not be your name, but it'll be like an ID number that you'll never have access to, but it refers uniquely to you. And inside that file, it's not like, a record of everything you've ever typed into Google or of everything you've ever searched for. In many ways, it's slightly more, it's slightly cleverer than that and slightly freakyer.

So it's everything that's inferred from the stuff that you've done online, right? So things like, you know, your age and your, and your marital status and your income bracket, right? All the boring stuff. But these data brokers collect an incredible amount of information. So things like your sexuality, the difference between your true sexuality and your declared sexuality, whether your parents got divorced when you were young. These are all things that came out in the report, by the way, I'm not making any of these up. Whether you've ever had an abortion, whether you've ever used drugs, whether you're gullible, whether you're a risk taker, all of these different kind of things. And when you are agreeing to cookies, you are essentially

allowing companies that will be targeting particular group of people. So maybe they're targeting risk-seeking people whose parents got divorced, right? I can't imagine what they'd be selling them, but whatever, that kind of a product. So with the cookies, when you appear on a website, when you click onto a website with cookies, essentially you're agreeing that they can send off a little flag to that data broker who then knows that someone in their target group is on. that website so they can serve you up an advert from one of their, one of their clients who wants to target someone like you. Well, it's scary. But we also know this anyway, right? I mean, we know

that the adverts that we see on our phones or on the internet are freakyly accurate, right? We know that you have, I don't know, you talk about wanting to buy a dog one day and the next day you're seeing adverts to dog beds, you know? it's not that your phone is listening to you because the technical challenge to do that would just be, it's not. It's that these algorithms are so good at understanding your behaviour that they can

know that you want a dog bed before you've even really decided that you're definitely a dog bed is the next thing that you need to do after you've decided to buy a dog. Wow. So is there really anything now as sort of free will or luck or chance are those things non-existent now

because of the technology we've got? An amazing question and an incredibly important point because that really is part of what these lectures are about. I think we want to demonstrate just how powerful and pervasive these mathematical techniques are, but also to really explain the limits to them because it's not like, it's not like, if I serve you up in that way for a dog, bed, it's not going to change whether you get a dog or not. Maybe it might make a bit of a

difference, perhaps very subtly, but we're talking about tiny, tiny, tiny changes. You still have your own mind. There's still, there's still, you know, free will, as you said, there's still, there's still all kinds of randomness and uncertainty that these algorithms and these mathematical techniques cannot cut through. So I think that's really a big part of, especially the third lecture, is working out what those limits are and working out what we want. those limits to be. Do you have a favourite of the Christmas Actress series? Oh yeah, I think it's going to be Marcus. This is a toy. That's 2006. So I was like 22 still watching Christmas lectures as I still am with my family now. Will you watch your own this Christmas?

No chance. Will they be watching it and you in the background or? Maybe. I might just disappear upstairs for a bit. I'm not very good at watching. my own stuff back. No. No one likes it though, do they? No, but I suppose like doing this job, if you end up recording yourself a lot, you have to get used to the sound of your own voice. You do.

The sound of my own voice I'm used to, it's just the moving pictures. Maybe I need to deep fake myself, so it's not me, not my actual face, and then I can watch it. And finally, you said, you know, the lectures have run for nearly 200 years. They've had Carl Sagan, St. David Attenborough. how do you feel following in their footsteps? And I think for me, personally, you're going to introduce a lot of young women and girls to this field of science and maths.

How does that make you feel? Terrified. I don't know. I think, yeah, there's a lot of impressive people in that list. There's also, though, there are some lectures that, you know, people don't necessarily remember. So if it goes badly, people just won't remember you. I mean, ultimately, you can't lose.

can you? If it goes badly, people won't remember. And if it goes really well and you go on to be Carl Sagan, then everyone would be really impressed. Yes. Keep thinking that way. Thank you. Thank you. That was mathematician, podcaster and television presenter Hannah Frye, talking about her upcoming Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, which will be broadcast on BBC 4 on the 26th, 27th and 28th of December at 8pm. That's it from us this year. We're having a very short, break before we're back on the 9th of January when I speak to astrophysicist and YouTuber Dr Becky Smithhurst about supermassive black holes. Until then, pick up a copy of BBC Science Focus magazine for some wild ideas to blow your mind or listen to one of the many

excellent interviews we've had over the past 12 months on our previous podcast episodes. And if you're still in the festive mood, then please leave us a little present with a rating or a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Until next time, have a happy new year. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with, analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.