LAUDED MATHMATICIAN and former child prodigy Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon has spoken about her experience of appearing in a video for Mercury Prize winning rapper Dave.

Dave won this year’s Hyundai Mercury Music Prize for his debut album Psychodrama recently.

The video for one of the album’s tracks, Black features Dr Imafidon as well as other inspiring black British people, including footballer Raheem Sterling, fellow rapper Stormzy, and sprinter Dina Asher Smith.

The hard hitting track explores racial identity and was the subject of controversy.

When it was added to the Radio 1 playlist earlier this year  it provoked a deluge of complaints from listeners leading to  breakfast show host Greg James addressing the issue on air.

CULTURE

Speaking on Yahoo Finance UK’s Global Change Agents with Lianna Brinded show, Imafidon said: “It was really nice because the video and the music and the track itself is talking a lot about themes of racism, and women of colour, and black women specifically … it’s fantastic to be appreciated as part of the culture.”

At the age of 11 Imafidon was the youngest girl ever to pass A-level computing, and was just 20 years old when she received her Master’s Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oxford.

Since then she has held positions at  Goldman Sachs, Hewlett-Packard and Deutsche Bank as well as Honorary Doctorates from Open University, Glasgow Caledonian University and Kent University among others.

EXPERIENCE

She used her wealth of experience to found STEMettes in 2013, an award-winning social initiative dedicated to inspiring and promoting the next generation of young women in the science, technology engineering and maths (STEM) sectors.

Since its creation STEMettes has exposed more than 40,000 young people across Europe to Anne-Marie’s vision for a more diverse and balanced science and tech community.

Imafidon continued:“Music is something that is almost like a litmus for what’s happening and what’s going on in the culture. Technology is such a big part of that that we should be part of these lyrics, that we should be part of those visuals, and it takes it out to an audience that might not have been looking for that kind of thing.”