In January 2021, mathematician Hannah Fry was diagnosed with cervical cancer. When she received her diagnosis, the oncologist told her there was still uncertainty whether the cancer was already at stage three and had spread to the lymph nodes. If it hadn’t, Fry’s chances of survival were 90 percent. If it had spread, however, those odds were about 60 percent. “It looked as though the cancer was in four of the nodes, but we weren’t totally sure,” she says. “The surgeons decided to do a very radical and aggressive surgery. They essentially took out about a third of my abdomen.”