Regular readers of The Aperiodical will not be surprised to hear that Hannah Fry is up to something exciting, but you will likely still be surprised by the sheer number of exciting things which Hannah Fry is currently doing. But this is why we are here after all, so here is your breaking FryDay news, hot off the presses.
Hannah Fry has teamed up with mathematicians John Urschel and Tim Chartier and co-founder of Masterclass Aaron Rasmussen to create an online calculus course for the new online education provider Outlier. The course will be relatively inexpensive ($400, so cheap compared to USA college courses) and will be refunded if you do not pass the course, will provide transferable college credits from the University of Pittsburgh for students, and features three different versions which you can mix and match to your own taste.
Fry is also going to be this year’s lecturer for the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures entitled Secrets and Lies. Across the three lectures Fry will cover the hidden numbers embedded in our lives, how they can help us separate truths from lies, be better at making choices, and just be happier, and while these all seem very positive the potential pitfalls of too much reliance on figures will also be discussed. The first lecture will seek to find the luckiest audience member, the second will show how algorithms have taken over our lives, often in invisible ways, and the third will look at the limits of what mathematics can achieve in our lives.
Not satisfied with a new online course and delivering this year’s Christmas lectures, Hannah Fry is also the host of the new podcast about the work going on at the artificial intelligence company DeepMind. Over its eight episodes the DeepMind podcast will feature stories about Artificial Intelligence, from how it is linked to neuroscience to how it is used in science to how to build it safely. A trailer for the podcast is now available and you can subscribe here.