Quotes from Hannah Fry

We literally hand over our most private data, our DNA, but we're not just consenting for ourselves, we are consenting for our children, and our children's children. Maybe we don't live in a world where people are genetically discriminated against now, but who's to say in 100 years that we won't?

History is littered with examples of objects and inventions with a power beyond their professed purpose. Sometimes it's deliberately and maliciously factored into their design, but at other times, it's a result of thoughtless omissions.

Human emotion isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable.

But the threat of a pandemic is different from that of a nerve agent, in that a disease can spread uncontrollably, long after the first carrier has succumbed.

On average, the higher the novelty score a film had, the better it did at the box office. But only up to a point. Push past that novelty threshold, and there's a precipice; the revenue earned by a film fell off a cliff.

The Gottman Institute's study about arguments in long-term relationships concludes that couples with the best chance at long-term success are the ones with a low negativity threshold: if something's wrong, they speak up about it immediately. That's something I've taken on board.

The future doesn't just happen. We are building it, and we are building it all the time.

When it comes to love, making long-term decisions is a risky business. Sooner or later, most of us decide to leave our carefree bachelor or bachelorette days behind us and settle down.

Our long-range predictions - especially those which anticipate extreme-weather events - rely on an assumption that the future will be similar to the past. Lose that, and we lose the tools that have allowed us to prepare for such eventualities.

Algorithms and data should support the human decision, not replace it.

We have this imbalance where the people who are making algorithms aren't talking to the people who are using them. And the people who are using them aren't talking to the people who are having decisions made about their lives by them.

No weather forecaster can tell you for sure when to wear a rain slicker, stock up on canned goods, or evacuate a city that's in a cyclone's path. All forecasters can offer is their best guess at the atmosphere of the future, whispered by the simulated blue marble and wrapped up in uncertainty.

You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody. You can infer any data that you like, and you can use it to manipulate them in any way that you choose. And you can roll out an algorithm that genuinely makes massive differences to people's lives, both good and bad, without any checks and balances.

Writing about 'What is art?' is not something I ever thought I'd be doing.

I think people have this hang-up from school that maths is this dusty old textbook that was finished hundreds of years ago, and all the answers are in the back. Whereas in my job I struggle to find anything that maths can't offer an interesting perspective on.

When you don't have diversity in the creative process, you inevitably end up with a single, narrow perspective in the output.

A century ago the Spanish flu confounded scientists and devastated whole regions, but while today's society has air travel and an enormous, heterogeneous population, we also have antibiotics, fantastic communication networks and, perhaps most crucially, more data than ever.

But for me, true art can't be created by accident. There are boundaries to the reach of algorithms. Limits to what can be quantified. Among all of the staggeringly impressive, mindboggling things that data and statistics can tell me, how it feels to be human isn't one of them.

Everything we're doing online is being not just monitored, but that information is being packaged up and sold and resold to manipulate us.

I do think we're at a point in our history where almost all of the big, grand, challenges faced by the human race are those that demand a scientific solution: climate change; access to clean water; over-crowding; plastic waste.

I'm a mathematician. I can trade in facts about false positives and absolute truths about accuracy and statistics with complete confidence.

We should actively be thinking about what our inventions would look like if exploited by someone with a less of a moral compass and decide if the world would really be better off with them in it.

An arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war.

There's barely any aspect of our modern lives that hasn't had a mathematical contribution at some point and yet, if you asked the average person, they might think that maths is just difficult, irrelevant and uninteresting.