3Blue1Brown @[email protected]
6.4M subscribers - no pronouns :c
My name is Grant Sanderson. Videos here cover a variety of t
Oh hey, it looks like the channel passed Tau Million subscribers! This is cause for some kind of celebration. What do you think about a simple behind-the-scenes style video on how I animate, both showing what manim is and how I use it?
If so, do you have any requests for a mathematically interesting thing to animate as a demonstration? Preferably something where the code can be short, but the final result has something interesting to look at. For instance, something like the illustrations of Lissajous curves would be perfect (see the animation and code below).
Also, the next installment on Transformers is coming soon, there were a few other things going on in my life in the last month that pulled me away from it.
I often prefer to read math than to watch videos on it, especially in reviewing material. For anyone who feels the same, there are now written/illustrated versions of the linear algebra series, thanks to the help of Kurt Bruns and James Schloss: www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/eigenvalues
Hey folks, the same group experimenting with making interactive quizzes for 3b1b started doing some for the linear algebra series. This is just for the first video, but we're curious to hear your impression as they make more beta.retainit.app/game/vectors-c1?r=3b1b
I don't know how many of you already follow @WelchLabsVideo, but after a while away from YouTube he's come back putting out some real gems. This history of science is always messier than classroom summaries tend to make it look, and this video does a great job of getting into Kepler's head as he tries to make sense of planetary motion.
Several people have asked if there will be a Summer of Math Exposition this year. Although we will not do a full SoME4 with a winner selection and prizes, there will be a more casual community-driven version, which people have given the delightful name SoMEπ.
People are still encouraged to try their hand at making a piece of math exposition this summer, whether a video or a written piece, and there will be a deadline to encourage completion, August 18th at 11:59 PM (UTC-12). After this, there will be a similar peer review process to past years, ensuring people receive feedback on their work. Past years have demonstrated how this process also has the wonderful side effect of kickstarting viewership on the video entries, giving the YouTube algorithm a chance to learn cowatching behavior between all of them.
The primary difference from past years is no final selection process for winners and no prizes.
Stay tuned to this discord for full information: discord.gg/WZvZMVsXXR
See also this post for some more details: 3blue1brown.substack.com/p/some
Last week Matt Parker had me join one of his "An Evening of Unnecessary Detail" events in New York. I invited Tim Blais, of the channel Acapella Science to come down, and we had a bit too much fun writing a parody of "Ain't No Sunshine" about the twin prime conjecture.
Thanks for your warm reception of the transformer videos! For those of you looking to get some hands-on practice with machine learning, I came across this site by @gptLearningHub which offers some coding exercises in conjunction with their lessons, which some of you may be interested in: www.gptandchill.ai/codingproblems
Feel free to share other such resources you like with others in the comments.
A small group is experimenting with making quizzes for 3b1b videos, as part of building an app for retention questions, and they put this one together for the central limit theorem video: beta.retainit.app/quiz/centrallt?r=3b1b&t=3b1b
If this is something you'd be into, take a look, and feedback would be very welcome.
We now have blog versions of the calculus series: www.3blue1brown.com/topics/calculus
This is thanks to the efforts of Kurt Bruns. Also, thanks to many other contributors (James Schloss, Josh Pullen, River Way, Vivek Verma), many other past videos have associated written versions, typically with comprehension questions and the occasional interactive sprinkled in.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts, especially from any teachers in the audience, on whether such written versions are useful. My own motivations include:
- When I learn math, and especially when I review math, I prefer things in writing.
- It's nice to have a home for associated comprehension questions.
- In any future where I expand on this content for a printed book, it can't hurt to have what already exists in this format.
Also, on the topic of associated comprehension questions, a company Retainit recently reached out offering to make associated quizzes for lessons. The sample they offered (link below) is for the video on visualizing 2^256, I think just because it's shorter. Would you want more of these made, say for more substantive lessons like the Central Limit Theorem?
beta.retainit.app/embed/quiz/256-bit-security?ref=…
Shorts barrage update:
Thanks again for your understanding while I've been moving the pile of shorts adapted from old lessons onto this channel. There's still a large pile more, and what I currently have scheduled is to keep posting some daily between now and the end of the week, then after that, have them go out only weekly every Saturday.
I don't like how posting them necessarily spams existing subscribers' notifications with snippets of old content they may have already seen, so I'm open to suggestions here. The goal is just to get them to exist in the short feed, spaced out enough to give the recommendation algorithm a chance to learn which ones people like.
For any of you who are curious, I was just looking at the analytics for this last week, and here are some conclusions
- Even early on, it's pretty clear that shorts are an effective way to introduce new audience members to old lessons, as measured by watch time from non-subscribers on (non-short) videos.
- People who land on a long-form video by clicking on the "related video" thing at the bottom of a short tend to spend more time on that video than those coming from other traffic sources (like suggested videos). I'm not sure what I'd expect here, but it's nice to see that people discovering lessons in this way evidently come in more invested.
- If you compare the age breakdown on shorts vs. long-form, contrary to what I was expecting, the age range where you see disproportionately more people on shorts is 25-34. The percentage of viewers in the more youthful range between 18 and 24 is about the same for both formats.
I'll be curious to see if those hold up, say, 6 months from now, when activity on shorts is more purely about discovery in the shorts feed, with less contamination from subscribers landing on them through the current barrage.
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In the meantime, I'm keeping busy animating the next new lesson. It'll be another physics one (though not optics), which is probably still at least two weeks out. Stany tuned!
My name is Grant Sanderson. Videos here cover a variety of topics in math, or adjacent fields like physics and CS, all with an emphasis on visualizing the core ideas. The goal is to use animation to help elucidate and motivate otherwise tricky topics, and for difficult problems to be made simple with changes in perspective.
For more information, other projects, FAQs, and inquiries see the website: www.3blue1brown.com