Brady Haran Australian Journalist From Glenelg

Early life

Brady Haran was born on 18 June 1976 in Glenelg, Australia. He studied journalism for a year before The Adelaide Advertiser hired him. In 2002 he moved from Australia to Nottingham in the United Kingdom, where he worked for the BBC, began working with film, and reported for East Midlands Today, BBC News Online and BBC radio stations.

Career

In 2007 Haran became filmmaker-in-residence at Nottingham Science City, under an agreement between the BBC and the University of Nottingham. His Test Tube project started as an idea for a documentary about scientists and their research. Instead of editing the footage, he decided to upload the raw material to YouTube, and Periodic Videos and Sixty Symbols grew out of that decision. He then left the BBC to make YouTube videos full time.

In his first five years as an independent filmmaker he made more than 1,500 videos, and in 2012 he was the producer, editor and interviewer behind 12 YouTube channels. His videos typically take the form of a relaxed interview in which he and an expert talk about the expert's field, and he often works with academics and other professionals.

Periodic Videos, begun in June 2008, covers the chemical elements and the periodic table. Haran makes it with Professor Martyn Poliakoff, and together they have produced more than 500 short videos on the elements and other chemistry topics, with the channel passing 159 million views. The two also wrote an article for Nature Chemistry and an essay for Science about the impact of the project. Sixty Symbols, which covers physics and astronomy, released its first video in April 2009. Numberphile began in October 2011 and explores mathematics; early videos each dealt with a single number, but the channel has since taken on topics such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the Riemann hypothesis. It is his most subscribed channel.

Other projects include Objectivity, launched in late 2014, in which Haran appears on camera to discuss and handle historic objects and manuscripts, often from the archives of the Royal Society. Deep Sky Videos, an astronomy channel started in October 2011, completed a series on all 110 Messier objects in September 2022. Computerphile, a sister channel to Numberphile that covers computer science, is mostly directed and produced by Sean Riley.

Haran also makes podcasts. He launched Hello Internet in January 2014 with the educational YouTuber CGP Grey; it reached first place on the iTunes podcast charts in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Canada and Australia, and it is now on indefinite hiatus. In August 2017 he started The Unmade Podcast with his friend Tim Hein, in which the two discuss podcast ideas they say they will never make. The Numberphile Podcast followed in November 2018, with Haran as sole host, giving mathematicians more room than the video channel does.

Recognition

Haran won a Stevie Award in 2008, in the International Business Awards, for the University of Nottingham website Test Tube. In 2012 he received a Webby Award for Periodic Videos, and in 2016 a Kelvin award for Sixty Symbols, shared with Michael Merrifield and Philip Moriarty. The University of Nottingham gave him an honorary Doctor of Letters in 2016. In 2021 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to broadcast and online media, and in 2024 he received the Christopher Zeeman Medal for communicating mathematics. In 2025 the International Astronomical Union named the main-belt asteroid 46925 Bradyharan after him.

Earlier honours include BBC Ruby Television Awards in 2004, 2005 and 2007, and a Radio Times Radio and Podcast Champion title in 2017.

Personal life

Haran is married to Kylie Pentelow, a journalist and television news presenter.