Poet's TEDxExeter video hits the big time

Pun-tastic and poignant, Harry Baker's poetry had him named winner of the Poetry Slam World Cup in 2012.  Now his performance at TEDxExeter in April 2014 has won him another prized accolade: the video of his love poem for prime numbers has been posted on the International TED.com website.

Under 1 per cent of the videos from locally organised TEDx events around the world are selected for posting on TED.com. Harry Baker¹s is the fourth from TEDxExeter to be recognised in this way. His performance has already gone viral and been viewed nearly 169,000 times on the TEDx YouTube channel. On TED.com it will reach a much larger audience. It had been live less than 24 hours and had already been viewed more than 82,000 times.

In its first year (2012) two of the 13 speakers at TEDxExeter were selected for TED.com. Nobel Peace Prize nominee Scilla Ellworthy who spoke about fighting with non-violence and Bandi Mbubi whose demands for mobile phones and other technology to be free of conflict minerals has inspired a growing movement.

Karima Bennoune's powerful talk last year about the brave people living in Muslim majority countries who are resisting the Islamist threat has had almost 1.25m views since it was posted on TED.com in July 2014. It has been translated into 21 languages including French and Arabic, and like our other talks has a truly global audience. And now Harry's clever, funny and moving performance has also been recognised.

Harry is in his final term of a maths degree at the University of Bristol. When he graduates, he wants to be a full-time writer. On hearing that his performance will be posted on TED.com he says: "This is nuts. It¹s crazy, stupid, brilliant nuts. When I got the email I was in an algebraic number theory lecture and I wanted to scream, but I don¹t think that anyone would have understood.

"I love what I do, and I want to do it forever. I am going to do it forever. I loved performing at TEDxExeter because it felt like what I had to say was important. I was doing the same poems that I've performed to audience of six people in a pub basement, and I was performing them between a guy who invents robot hands and a woman who had triplets and then went to both the North and South Pole. That¹s fun. Now it¹s going on the main site with the crazy beatbox guy and Bono. I¹m really happy.

"I write stuff to try and connect with people, I always have. It being shared on TED.com just means it connects with a whole lot more people overnight and hopefully can continue in the future. Life is exciting."

TEDxExeter organiser and licensee Claire Kennedy adds: "We are thrilled that four of our talks are on TED.com. We already know from our own website stats that we have visitors from around the world. The top three countries are the UK, USA and China, with visitors from Ukraine, India, Vietnam, Romania and many more.

"Ideas generated here at TEDxExeter are inspiring and impacting people in incredible ways, reaching the world and linking our city and our sponsors to local, national and international audience. With more talks on TED.com that reach will be even greater."

TEDxExeter 2015 conference will take place on 24 April 2015. The theme is Taking the long view. Information about the speakers is available at tedxexeter.com/events/tedxexeter-2015/.