Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. Oh, My castaway this week is the computer scientist Dame Wendy Hall.

Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, she fought long and hard

to prove that her type of web science was highly significant and here to stay.

If algebraic topology and open hypermedia systems really aren't your thing, then don't worry.

Dame Wendy is also in demand as a brilliant communicator on what can seem to outsiders to be impenetrable topics.

Her parents were from humble beginnings and it was clear from the get-go that their

firstborn had a budding flare for numbers. Aged just six, she was charged with teaching

a group of schoolmates maths. The first in her family

to go to university she rejected Cambridge judging it too stuffy. She says, I get too excited

about stuff. I love my life and I'm passionate about web science,

women in science and shopping.

You claim that if you weren't a computer scientist then, Wendy Hall, you would be a personal shopper and I wonder if

this is a cany technique to stop people feeling rather intimidated by your vast capabilities

in your brain is it to make you more approachable?

Possibly but I am very much a people person. in your

possibly but I am very much a people person I could have been an events organizer as well I think I just enjoy social events and enjoy making people happy I suppose you're a people person as you say you're a very

vibrant person you come in here today you know just fizzing with energy a lot of

people think that computers somehow as we increase our use of them they distance

us from the people part of life you're

...