But it all started with Maxwell. Lets think where wed be without radio — Christopher Budd (mathematician)

"But then he did something which mathematicians can do... [i.e.,] what-if experiments. You can say... what if these equations have other solutions, and he found... waves with the same speed as light, but a different and than light... and we now call them radio waves. ...Maxwell discovered radio by pure mathematics alone. It was later... that... Hertz found them experimentally, and... later... Marconi and others took the theory and turned it into practical means of communication."

"The way maths is used... has... changed enormously, essentially in my own lifetime. ...The whole thing has changed remarkably, largely because of the develoopment of computers."

"[T]he shame about all of this is not only is it not true. Its really, really, really not true! ...Math is basically the basis of the modern world. The modern world would simply not exist without mathematics."

"If there wasnt air around me, Id die very very quickly... and math is like that for technology. Take the math away, the technology fails, but just like the air around us its invisible, and lots of people dont know its there."

"The technology that we celebrate today, everything we do, is all heavily based on math. In my pocket I have my ... absolutely stuffed full of mathematics, and lots of mathematicians work in the smart phone industry."

"Who was the most famous female mathematician? ...Emmy Noether, [was an] excellent... fantastic mathematician, but if I went into the street, who would know Emmy Noether? ...Even more famous than Marie Curie. Films have been made about this woman. Ada Lovelace... famous, but not as famous as this one. Ive seen films, books have been written about her. Hugely famous, most children would know her name. Im going to put her picture up and its going to surprise you. ...Florence Nightingales an incredibly famous woman because... she basically founded modern nursing. ...The story ...she was sent to Crimea and... set up hospitals... which saved huge number of lives, and when she went back to England she developed modern nursing and her practice... are used all over the world, and everyone thinks shes a nurse, but... she was a . She was one of the first members of the and was a really good statistician... [T]he way she cured people wasnt so much through medical care. Its through the... more modern approach, which was to try to work out what was causing people to be ill. ...[S]he gathered loads and loads of data on this and... produced graphs of this data... essentially to convey what she was doing to politicians, because politicians then and sadly now, dont know what numbers are... [S]o she did this through graphical information and she developed... rose diagrams which are very like pie charts... [S]o she not only developed ... she also developed graphical presentation of data, which is universal, and shes incredibly famous, but noone knows she was a mathematician. ...The Royal Statistical Society ...building is called the Nightingale building, after her."