Dr Hannah Fry is quickly becoming the UK’s best-known mathematician, having appeared as an expert and presenter on BBC4’s Climate Change by Numbers, Radio 4’s The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, and City in the Sky, an in-depth study of the aviation industry, currently on BBC2. Far from being a mere pop scientist, however, Fry is a much-published researcher and a lecturer at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), where she specialises in the mathematics of urban and social systems. After gaining her PhD in fluid dynamics five years ago, she has published papers combining mathematics with criminology and architecture, as well as her 2015 book The Mathematics of Love, which applies statistical and data-scientific models to dating, sex and marriage. The accompanying TED talk has been viewed nearly 4 million times.
In City in the Sky, you look at the maths behind the aviation industry. Are you concerned about the way that industry is expanding?
Passenger numbers are set to double over the next 20 years, so there are definitely challenges facing the industry. We do have a section [in the show] looking at where air travel might go in the future: electric-powered planes is one thing and smaller planes are more efficient, surprisingly. It is astonishing that there are a million people in the air at any one time and sustaining that does require international co-operation on a scale that you really don’t see in other settings.