Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

•  “I think that it’s inevitable that if you’re good at something, you just find it all the more enjoyable” – Hannah Fry
• If schools want students to like math more, teachers should put in the effort to demonstrate just how useful it is in the real world
•  Algorithms can be incredibly useful but they can also backfire
  • “The real danger of relying too much on algorithms to detect those cancerous cells is that if you are too good at detecting them, you’re not just good at detecting the ones that then go on to be a problem, you’re also going to be good at detecting the ones that are nothing to worry about” – Hannah Fry
    • “Hence potentially causing huge numbers of people to have very serious and very invasive techniques like double mastectomies” 
• “Maths is really the biggest weapon we have on our side. We don’t have pharmaceutical interventions, we don’t have a vaccine yet and all we have really is the data and the numbers” – Hannah Fry
  • The epidemiologists and mathematicians have been raising the alarm and helping drive government policies
    • “We don’t have a crystal ball to look into the future but really maths is the only thing that’s there guiding us” 
• According to math, spend the first 37% of your dating life having fun and playing the field
  • After that period has passed, settle down with the next person that you find who is better than everyone else you’ve dated
• The best relationships are the ones with low negativity thresholds, or couples who speak up quickly about the things that annoy them
  • “It’s couples where you’re continually repairing and resolving very, very tiny issues in your relationship because otherwise you risk bottling things up and then not saying anything and then coming home and being totally angry” – Hannah Fry

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

Mathematician and author of Hello World and The Mathematics of Love, Hannah Fry discusses the role of maths in society, the dating world and we explore what it means to be human in the age of algorithms.

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