![]() And the second thing was, I realized that I actually liked applied mathematics. And mathematics was much more kind of, you know, it's not, I wouldn't say an exclusively individual pursuit, but it is a, you know, it's a very abstract thing. And I realized that I was a much more social person. And the first was actually research and research can either be individual or it can be collaborative. But I kind of realized that, first of all, there are two aspects to continue a career in academia beyond an undergraduate degree. And I read things like Simon Singh's book, you know, on Fermat's Last Theorem, and this sort of thing, and it really inspired me. And I thought at the time that oh, you know, I would solve things like, I don't know, Riemann hypothesis and things like that. And it's something I would sort of study in my spare time as well, in addition to the stuff that we did at school, and I thought, well, you know, it'd be lovely to go somewhere like Cambridge, they have a very good maths course, it's challenging. Well, actually, in hindsight, I shouldn't have done maths, which is why I went from astrophysics to astrophysics, but it actually gave me the training that I needed, why I went into maths, well, it was something, I was a subject that I found quite easy at school, but I really enjoyed it, too. So with that in mind, what made you choose to do a maths undergraduate degree rather than go straight into sort of physical So around about six or seven, I sort of really started to get into that television programs, I used to watch those things like sky at night, and even Blue Peter, and just books I used to read as well. And it's just the scale of it all just was mind blowing. I mean, for me, it was just mind blowing that there are all of these possibilities, there are these objects that we didn't understand, which were like black holes, which, I guess is what we're talking about today, which, you know, more powerful than perhaps even entire galaxies, and so on. And the idea that there was just this almost infinite, you know, void out there to explore that was, you know, sparsely filled with stars, and maybe planets and extraterrestrial life, and all sorts of bizarre landscapes. But sort of when I was six or seven, I used to read a lot of sort of pictorial encyclopedias, and so on. So I was kind of more into that side of things archaeology, paleontology, and so on. Well, actually, I wasn't always into space and astrophysics, I wanted to I love dinosaurs. ![]() So, one question we want to ask was, has your interest in space and in astrophysics predated your university career? Is it something that's been with you since birth, with a name like that And your name actually means moonlight in Tamazight. ![]() So one thing that I found when doing a bit of research for this, you speak three languages, which is English, German, and Tamazight. ![]() He was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and is currently a labor human trust early career researcher Fellow at UCL Ziri, welcome to the podcast. He then started his PhD in astrophysics at UCL, which he completed in 2014. His background is the he got an MA in maths from Cambridge in 2006, followed by an MSc in physics from UCL in 2008. Ziri is a high energy theoretical astrophysicist working in the astrophysics group at the Milan Space Science Laboratory here at UCL. I'm your host Malcolm with me is my co host, Maymana. Hello and welcome to Hypot-enthuse the podcast from the faculty of mathematical and physical sciences at UCL, as we like to call it MAPS.
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