Rachel Annabelle Riley was born on 11 January 1986 and is a British television presenter.
26 Facts About Rachel Riley
2.
Rachel Riley was a contestant on the BBC celebrity dance show Strictly Come Dancing in 2013.
3.
Rachel Riley then completed a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Oxford.
4.
Since it was first broadcast on 2 January 2012, Rachel Riley has performed her Countdown role on the comedy crossover spin-off version, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, alongside comedian Jimmy Carr as host.
5.
From September 2013, Rachel Riley appeared in the eleventh series of the BBC One ballroom dancing programme Strictly Come Dancing with professional dancing partner and future husband Pasha Kovalev.
6.
From 2013 to 2014, Rachel Riley co-presented on the Channel 5 programme The Gadget Show with Jason Bradbury.
7.
Rachel Riley presented three series of the show and was later replaced by Amy Williams.
8.
In 2016, Rachel Riley was part of the three-person presenting team for ITV's six-part series, It's Not Rocket Science, billed by the network as an entertainment series celebrating science.
9.
Rachel Riley began dating her Strictly dance partner, Pasha Kovalev, soon after the show ended in December 2013.
10.
In May 2019, Rachel Riley announced that she was pregnant with the couple's first child.
11.
On 15 December 2019, Rachel Riley gave birth to a baby girl.
12.
On 5 November 2021, Rachel Riley gave birth to their second daughter.
13.
Rachel Riley is a keen supporter of Manchester United, like her father who was originally from Salford; in October 2010, Rachel Riley presented a programme on the club's television channel MUTV that featured a tour of their Trafford Training Centre in Carrington.
14.
Rachel Riley stated that, "My family came over in the pogroms" from Tsarist Russia.
15.
In 2018, Rachel Riley began a campaign against the way the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn had handled allegations of antisemitism.
16.
Rachel Riley said she decided to speak out after seeing "Israel is a racist endeavour" posters on London bus stops.
17.
In January 2019, Rachel Riley made a speech at a Westminster reception for the Holocaust Educational Trust and addressed what she described as the "hideous abuse" she had received.
18.
In February 2019, according to The Times and i, Rachel Riley had been involved in talks to set up a centrist breakaway party from Labour.
19.
In November 2019, Rachel Riley posted an image on Twitter of herself wearing a shirt with an edited image of Corbyn carrying a sign bearing the caption "Jeremy Corbyn is a racist endeavour".
20.
The tweet was condemned by some for erasing the struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa, the original subject of the sign, to make a political point, with some users calling for Rachel Riley to be fired.
21.
Rachel Riley was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to Holocaust education.
22.
Rachel Riley has visited schools to enthuse pupils on the "joys of applied maths, quantum mechanics and time travel and so on".
23.
In June 2019, Rachel Riley was criticised by environmental groups and accused of greenwashing for her promotion of the "future energy solutions" of Shell, an oil and gas company.
24.
Rachel Riley is listed on the website of the Center for Countering Digital Hate as a patron.
25.
In October 2021, Rachel Riley published her first book, At Sixes and Sevens: How to Understand Numbers and Make Maths Easy.
26.
Rachel Riley has made brief appearances in Dispatches, Britain's Brightest and 1001 Things You Should Know.