We talk to Professor Jennifer Rogers
Thought maths was boring and pointless? Not any more – data and statistics are more relevant to our daily lives than ever before and one Teddington resident can help explain the lot. Fiona Adams meets Professor Jennifer Rogers.
When are we going to get out of this?’ is a question that people around the world have been asking since the beginning of last year when the Coronavirus first reared its ugly head and started to claim lives. It is also the most common question asked these days of super statistician Professor Jennifer Rogers.
Sadly, the Yorkshire-born maths whizz does not have the answer and asks me over the phone as we enter Britain’s third lockdown that if someone out there does could they please let her know!
Like everyone, the Teddington resident has seen life put on hold, with her fiancé Justin losing his newly acquired job as a pilot with British Airways and their wedding having to be postponed twice.
With dark hair, a ready smile and an infectious laugh, Professor Rogers is not your regular maths boffin, yet she has become a popular media guest over the course of the pandemic, popping up as ITV’s resident statistician and on programmes such as the BBC’s Panorama and Watchdog and on Radio 4’s More or Less.
Screen friendly she may be, but with an impressive academic and research record, combined with a special interest in the development and application of novel statistical methodologies, particularly in medicine, as well as an effortless ability to relate to the average person at home, it is no surprise that she has become the go-to person for deciphering the huge amount of numbers and statistics fired at us from all angles.
“Even I get bamboozled by it sometimes,” she laughs. “There’s just so much data. It’s great that all this information is available but there’s so much information being added all the time.”
While statistics play an important role in everyone’s daily lives – from ordering pizza to deciding where to live – Jen never imagined she’d get to talk about numbers as much as she has over the past nine months.
“I don’t remember the spotlight ever being as focused on data and evidence and statistics as it is now; since the first lockdown back in March we’ve been bombarded with data on a day-to-day basis and I didn’t think I would ever see that. I’ve always enjoyed the public communication part of my career, I think maths and stats are such powerful tools, but people are so scared of them, they’re a bit misunderstood.”
Jen has been so successful at unravelling these number mysteries that she won the 2020 annual Health Watch Award for her work in improving the understanding of statistics through the media and I’m more than a little gobsmacked to discover that maths was not always her favourite subject at school. “I think I was a bit scared of it and at school, I didn’t really see the point of it,” she admits.
“You’re often taught trigonometry, algebra etc but you don’t really understand why you’re doing it, why it’s useful. I was always convinced that I was rubbish too, but a teacher convinced me to do it at A level and it was then that I really fell in love with it and statistics, in particular.
“I just love the fact that with statistics you have data, you can do stuff with it and you can immediately see why it’s useful and the application of it. I could see the power of it and what you could do with it.”
As such Jen can completely understand why, as a nation, we have become a little bit obsessed with data over the course of the pandemic. “The decisions the Government is making are impacting our day-to-day lives in a way that we’ve never seen. These decisions are impacting us so much that people want to know what the evidence is and want to make the Government accountable for its actions. The public is asking why.“
We’ve also seen a rise in couch statisticians
If we have daily data that is subject to fluctuation and random noise, how do we figure out what’s going on beneath all of that? Which data sources are more reliable than others? What are the pitfalls, for example, with
the way the Government defines the deaths as they currently are, within 28 days of a positive test result? Why that might not be the best metric to use? Why do they use it? It’s been interesting to have that narrative, to have that educational process going on alongside it all to help people to get to grips with it.”
Jen grew up in Wakefield, near Leeds, with a younger sister and brother and parents who liked to question and inform their children. “My mum is pretty good at maths and worked as an auditor at one point and my dad is very sciencey. So we grew up getting science lessons before we went to bed,” she explains. “Things like ‘how does thunder and lightning work?’ I can name the first 20 elements of the periodic table, that sort of thing.”
I learnt about different types of data and how they are analysed and it was the medical applications that really interested me. I have always liked the idea that what I do is helping people, helping people to stay alive longer, helping them to live better lives.
She honed her craft in academia at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Oxford before taking up her current position – and first non-academic post – at research organization Phastar in Chiswick where she is Vice President of Statistical Research and Consultancy.
She has also just completed a stint as Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society.
Her career is not all serious number crunching though. She has done maths stand-up on YouTube with Matt Parker and is a keen participant in Science Showoff.
“It’s a sort of cabaret night in the pub, where people come along because they want to watch some science. Believe me, there is nothing more scary than talking about maths and science in front of people who have been drinking. I am reliably informed on a number of occasions that I’m not actually that funny!”
Jen’s passion for sharing her interest extends also to youngsters and she is involved with Maths Inspiration, an enrichment programme for teenagers, which – in normal times – involves showbizzy events in big theatres with puzzles, music and inspirational speakers.
“I wish there had been something like Maths Inspiration when I was a kid,” she says. “At every show there are people who do maths as part of their job, like an engineer, a statistician etc. There’s definitely been a bit of an identity crisis in the past when it wasn’t cool to be into maths or to be a mathematician and sometimes in celebrity culture it’s appeared OK to say ‘Oh, I don’t do maths’ in a way that it’s not OK to say ‘I don’t read or I don’t write’.
Now that’s starting to change and with TV shows like The Big Bang Theory and presenters like Professor Brian Cox, it’s getting an image overhaul. It’s a bit chic and cool to be a nerd. ”And there is always someone with an enquiring mind keen to ask an impossible question.
Aside from probability corkers, such as ‘what is the likelihood of life on another planet?’ or ‘what’s the best street to buy property on in Monopoly?’, Jen was once asked to work out what the chances were of someone withdrawing a £10 note from a cash-point, only to find it was the exact one that had been signed by a friend ten years earlier.
“I didn’t even know where to start with that one. You have to look at how many £10 notes have been in circulation since ten years ago, how many get taken out of circulation each year, how many get put in circulation each year, work out the probability it still exists and how many are in circulation right now, the friends people have. It’s an interesting problem! ”Now there’s a lockdown conundrum to keep you busy.
See Jen’s explanation of the £10 note probability question here or visit her website: jenniferrogers.co.uk
