With her sassy sense of humour, the 37-year-old academic has emerged as one of Britain’s most recognisable mathematicians (admittedly, a small subset of celebrities). Mercifully, Fry has rebounded strongly from her illness and has resumed her hectic schedule of writing, lecturing and broadcasting. “Unfortunately, in the pandemic you’re limited for choice so I just thought I’d get my ears pierced,” she smiles. I got away with it,” she says.Īfter coming through such difficult times, Fry thought about all the things she would like to do with the rest of her life but hadn’t done, such as quitting her job or travelling the world. “It was very close to being very bad but I got really lucky. A routine smear test had flagged cervical cancer necessitating radical surgery and several weeks of recuperation. “The actual truth of it is that I was really sick earlier this year, I had cancer,” she says.

I ask her whether this has indeed happened. We had hit on the bistro to meet because it was close to the Liberty department store, where Fry was due to have her ears pierced. In a blur of flame-red hair, fizzy enthusiasm and effusive apologies, Hannah Fry arrives a little late at Little Social, a modish restaurant just off London’s Regent Street. Dr Hannah Fry (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) discusses the limitations of AI, and how to teach Boris Johnson about exponential growth, in a wide-ranging interview for the Financial Times.

Hello World by Hannah Fry