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Comment by vaylian

16 hours ago

Well deserved. She is an excellent science communicator.

Completely agree. I’d recommend her book “Hello world: How to be human in the age of the machine” to anyone who isn’t familiar. It’s one of those books where even if you know about programming, AI etc it’s worth reading because she hasn’t dumbed down the content even though she’s made it accessible to folks who don’t.

Fun fact: I heard an interview with her and she said she got into maths because her family are all crazy about Formula One racing and she thought working on the aerodynamics etc would be interesting. She eventually got her “dream job” working on aerodynamics of F1 cars and found it really boring because she didn’t really get to do maths, all she did was write python simulations, leave them to run overnight and read the results in the morning, so she phoned her supervisor (who had worked his personal contacts to introduce her for the F1 job) and went back to working in his lab.

  • I met her when she gave a lecture in London about algorithms as part of a promotional tour for the book.

    We chatted about Ada Lovelace (a topic she also did a documentary about for the BBC) and she was exactly the same in person as her personality is on the TV / Radio / Podcasts.

    That was definitely a highlight of that year for me.

Agreed. A gifted communicator of over-looked topics in science and mathematics and is well deserved of this prize.