Author Archive for Hannah Fry

The return of the Tuesday Teaser

by Hannah Fry • Tuesday 7 May 2013 • Comments Off

I’ve missed puzzles. I’ve been too busy recently ‘working’ and ‘being a grown up’ to play with any. But this week CASA’s @frogo has lined me up with a couple of absolute…

by Hannah Fry • Thursday 21 February 2013 • Comments Off

This video came about as a splinter project of some work I’ve been doing at UCL, trying to understand the 2011 London riots from a mathematical perspective. While we were…

by Hannah Fry • Thursday 21 February 2013 • Comments Off

Today saw our new paper on the London Riots published as part of the nature series in Scientific Reports. The work began a few months after the events of summer…

by Hannah Fry • Sunday 5 August 2012 • Comments Off

Ok. Well maybe they aren’t. But I recently gave it a good bash at a stand-up comedy routine for UCL’s brightclub. The night is a sort of academic variety night,…

by Hannah Fry • Monday 9 July 2012 • Comments Off

UCL recently hosted their first ever TEDx event, and to my amazement (probably after seeing some seriously dodgy maths themed stand-up I did) they invited me to give a talk….

by Hannah Fry • Wednesday 25 April 2012 • Comments Off

On Monday, UCL public engagement played host to a new type of event, funded by EPSRC and titled Focus On The Positive. The idea is beautifully simple – six academics…

by Hannah Fry • Tuesday 20 March 2012 • Comments Off

This week, a politics question: Since WW2, how many British Prime Ministers first got the job without winning a general election? As ever, feel free to gloat and post answers and…

by Hannah Fry • Tuesday 13 March 2012 • Comments Off

Sorry for the lack of Tuesday Teaser last week, it’s because I was too busy living it up here. Back in full swing now, I promise. And to show you…

by Hannah Fry • Tuesday 28 February 2012 • Comments Off

I promised I would try and avoid general knowledge teasers, but I just really like this question – so I hope that you’ll forgive me, just this once. There are…

by Hannah Fry • Tuesday 21 February 2012 • Comments Off

This week a word puzzle: Which plural noun in the English language becomes singular when you add an s? As ever, please feel free to gloat in the comments section below…..

by Hannah Fry • Tuesday 21 February 2012 • Comments Off

From here you can download the lecture notes from my latest LTCC course: Complex Systems Dynamics. Week 1: Powerpoint slides: Part I, Part II Written notes: Part I, Part II…

by Hannah Fry • Tuesday 14 February 2012 • Comments Off

This week’s teaser is about the London tube network: Which is the only London Underground station whose name does not include any of the letters in the word ‘Mackerel’? With…

by Hannah Fry • Tuesday 7 February 2012 • Comments Off

This week’s teaser is a geography one.. Which state of the USA is the most: i) Northerly ii) Easterly iii) Westerly iv) Southerly. Feel free to post your solutions at…

by Hannah Fry • Wednesday 1 February 2012 • Comments Off

For the past 8 years or so, I’ve been a member of a pub quiz team with some good friends of mine from my undergraduate days. We’ve had differing degrees…

by Hannah Fry • Wednesday 1 February 2012 • Comments Off

This code reads in a .csv file called LatLon, expecting two columns with headers – Latitude and Longitude (in WGS84, decimal form). If the script is run in the same…

by Hannah Fry • Wednesday 1 February 2012 • Comments Off

A few months ago, I wrote a python script to convert British National grid coordinates (OSGB36) to latitude and longitude (WGS84). A fellow blogger Andrzej Bieniek very kindly pointed out that the algorithm…

by Hannah Fry • Monday 23 January 2012 • Comments Off

A friend of mine has just started using Python, and asked me for a quick run down of the basic syntax. Given that, wherever possible, I try to live my life according…

by Hannah Fry • Wednesday 16 November 2011 • Comments Off

I wonder how long I can carry on working at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and still manage to avoid learning any GIS. This week: Bezier curves, how to…

by Hannah Fry • Monday 10 October 2011 • Comments Off

EDIT: Andrzej Bieniek brought to my attention that this version is correct to 100m. For a more accurate script (accurate to 5m) see my new post. I have recently started to…

by Hannah Fry • Thursday 6 October 2011 • Comments Off

I submitted my PhD thesis in January 2011, and was awarded the degree after my viva in March. You can see the thesis in in full by clicking on the…

by Hannah Fry • Monday 3 October 2011 • Comments Off

In the past few weeks our mathmo team: Toby Davies, Peter Baudains and myself, have been looking into some of the reasons why the London riots happened. If we…

by Hannah Fry • Monday 3 October 2011 • Comments Off

This guide should give you a good overview of the packages you’ll need to download and install to start scientific programming using Python. First, Python itself. Python 2.7 is the latest…

by Hannah Fry • Thursday 25 August 2011 • Comments Off

A couple of days ago I saw a post on twitter about the proof that 1 + 1 = 2 by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. It appears in…

by Hannah Fry • Friday 15 April 2011 • Comments Off

Following on from the storming success of my last puzzle post (I don’t like to brag, but I believe it had over…

by Hannah Fry • Friday 15 April 2011 • Comments Off

If we’re being accurate, the title should really be “The importance of using appropriate temporal spacing when applying a discretisation to a continuous time scale”. But I felt the above…

by Hannah Fry • Thursday 14 April 2011 • Comments Off

I ruddy love this puzzle. (Find the original post here). Have had great fun tormenting friends and colleagues with it over the last few days. To begin with, we –…

by Hannah Fry • Tuesday 29 March 2011 • Comments Off

Recently I’ve been getting into the habit of reading maths and logic puzzle books on my tube journey home. I get some slightly weird looks from my fellow commuters when…

by Hannah Fry • Monday 28 March 2011 • Comments Off

def HelloWorld:
pass

by Hannah Fry • Sunday 6 March 2011 • Comments Off

This guide should give you a good overview of the packages you’ll need to download and install to start scientific programming using Python. First, Python itself. There are later versions than the 2.6 which I use but: a) they can have some compatibility issues when installing other toolkits b) unless you really know what you’re doing, 2.6 is [...]

by Hannah Fry • Friday 4 March 2011 • Comments Off

I’m Hannah Fry, I’ve been lecturing at UCL for 5 years, trained as a mathematician and now working as a fully fledged academic on a global dynamics and complexity project. Now that I’ve finished my PhD, I thought it was time to grow up and learn a proper programming language. Python, in its similarities to [...]