Quotes from Hannah Fry

In every community, there are a number of 'social super-spreaders' among us. Long-suspected and emphatically confirmed by our data, these are people who - through dint of their job, or lifestyle, or perhaps even genetic makeup - would be more dangerous in the instance of a pandemic than the average person.

But as soon as Facebook decided that they wanted to become purveyors of news, suddenly you have these highly personalized newsfeeds where everything is based on what your friends like, what you like, things that you've read in the past.

Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave.

Because, ultimately, we can't just think of algorithms in isolation. We have to think of the failings of the people who design them - and the danger to those they are supposedly designed to serve.

The invisible pieces of code that form the gears and cogs of the modern machine age, algorithms have given the world everything from social media feeds to search engines and satellite navigation to music recommendation systems.

The weather doesn't respect political or geographic boundaries: we're all living under the same sky. And so weather prediction has been a marvel not only of technology but also of international cooeperation.

So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians.

Every time you shop online, every time you sign up for a newsletter, or register on a website, or enquire about a new car, or fill out a warranty card, or buy a new home, or register to vote - you are unwittingly handing over a small clue as to who you are and how you behave.

People are often quite lazy. We like taking the easy way out - we like handing over responsibility, we like being offered shortcuts that mean we don't have to think.

All around us, algorithms provide a kind of convenient source of authority: an easy way to delegate responsibility, a short cut we take without thinking.

If we permit flawed machines to make life-changing decisions on our behalf - by allowing them to pinpoint a murder suspect, to diagnose a condition or take over the wheel of a car - we have to think carefully about what happens when things go wrong.

Whenever we haven't got enough information to make decisions for ourselves, we have a habit of copying the behaviour of those around us.

It's true that you can't take an individual rain droplet and say where it's come from or where it's going to end up. But you can say with pretty good certainty whether it will be cloudy tomorrow.

We're living in an age where new technology offers gigantic upsides - artificial intelligence has the potential to diagnose cancer, catch serial killers and reduce prison populations.

When designing algorithms as a business owner, your incentive is your profit, something for your business, it's not an incentive to maximise something for the individual.

As the law catches up and the battle between corporate profits and social good plays out, we need to be careful not to be lulled into a false sense of privacy.

And anytime a programmer makes a decision about how to deal with data, how to average it or clean it, you're imparting more of your own bias on it.

One of the first things I did when I finished my Ph.D. was work with the police to look at what happened during the London riots in 2011, which took over the city.

You can't assess the value of an innovation in isolation, you have to consider whose hands it's in.

I'm writing a book called 'The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus' about the maths of Christmas: how to set up a secret Santa so it's totally fair; how to decorate your tree mathematically; how to win at Monopoly.

Wind depends on temperature. Temperature depends on pressure. And pressure depends on wind. It's an intricate mathematical tapestry that is far too intertwined to unpick by hand.

Imagine life without any algorithms at all, you wouldn't be able to do anything. This is already completely encompassing. We have a habit of over-trusting what mathematics or computer scientists tell us to do, without questioning it, too much faith in the magical power of analysis.

I spend quite a lot of time thinking about how curated our information is. What we watch, what we read, what we buy, often who we talk to, is all shaped and influenced by some kind of a mathematical algorithm.

There's actually an awful lot of mathematics that goes into designing a railway, keeping it running, making sure everything runs optimally. Every time you need something to be optimal there's going to be some mathematics at play.