The traditional lecture does have a lot of value, however, we are also quite certain that the instructional experience can be improved through the addition of visualizations and simulations. This is especially true for interactive visualizations where the learner can ask, "What if ...", experiment, and see the results of their interactions.
The lecture format is very old and would not have persisted if it didn't provide a good value. At the same time, it's age also implies that there is room for improvement.
Haha, the way maths is taught at university hasn't changed in centuries.
Let's not pretend this has all been figured out and perfected. Heck, most maths professors I encountered in my studies could trace their scientific lineage straight back to C.F.Gauss[1] and that's how they taught. Don't get me wrong, some were great teachers, others not so much, but there are valid alternatives to the classic lecture.
The Gutenberg Method of teaching acknowledges the existence of the printing press and suggests one person standing at the front telling everyone what to write down may be outdated
I feel like quite a few of the content creators I watch are starting to “show their face”, though the big one that comes to mind is the Real Engineering guy. A few of his newest videos have had him acting a bit like a host, interviewer and narrator.
It’s also weird when some of these creators swap with somebody else, like veratasium has had his producer do some of the videos instead.
Framed differently, it sounds like the youtuber opportunisticially divulged some of their true thoughts on topics slowly over time that would have alienated members of their audience had they known who and what they were initially supporting. Pretty cowardly, but not an uncommon tactic amongst his similar peers.
In light of receiving new information that goes against your own tenants against poorly researched misinformation, changing your opinion isn't really a noteworthy response.
Framed in an insane way by someone looking to denigrate someone they don't like. I have no idea who you're targeting but you obviously have a chip on your shoulder.
From what I've seen about AvE he was mostly against the (batshit insane) reaction from the federal government to the truckers convoy in Ottawa. That's the only video that he made specifically about COVID I think (I don't know if he mentioned something else in other videos though). Not sure if that makes him a nutjob lol
Early on he made fun of people who wore masks. I'd watched almost every video for years before that but as one of many impacted by others not taking covid seriously, I went cold turkey.
He featured multiple times before with Matt Parker and Brady Haran (NF), strange that you missed it. Although I guess even in this niche channel preferences vary wildly.
To me it appeared more like he was aware of a limitation in the new rendering logic he was working on in the backend, and that he knew a simple (high level) workaround.
He knew about the bug, but developing this software is not his main job, producing videos is.
The fact that he knew the place, the reason, and came up with a workaround live demonstrates that he invests time into improving his toolkit. And not occasionally, but actively.
In larger companies this is how arsonist-firefighter engineers look impressive... fixing a bug they are responsible for while in a highly visible position
I was the young "tech guy" inside the business development department at Earthlink in the mid 90s. The bizdev folks would propose ideas and I would think them through and realize there were technical issues, and when I shared my concerns, they would all be disheartened. But, sometime later, I would figure out a way around the "problem". They were perpetually grateful, but after a number of these iterations, I got the sense that I was mainly solving problems that I had invented. I actually even shared my concern about that with my boss, and he dismissed it – I think they enjoyed the rollercoaster ride.
Omg I would love to make an explainer on bridging algorithms[1] with this tool! I've been a huge fan of their use in participatory democracy processes since 2016 (using tools like Pol.is), and have wanted to make a contribution to increasing literacy around the foundational math involved <3
Had I known about Manim back when his Summer of Math Exposition[2] was happening, I def would have dived in!
I had no idea this existed, thanks so much for the link! Reading their paper right now, and I'd love to see your explainer once you make it :) My website is linked from my profile, send me a link on social media if you ever get around to making that explainer!
This seems like some kind of NGO word salad slop dressing itself up with a bit of extraneous math notation; this is almost exactly the opposite of the type of stuff 3B1B covers in his videos, or that (I must imagine) Manim is optimized for.
It's also what bums me out about YouTube. There is an insane amount of effort that goes into producing high-quality videos - orders of magnitude more than would go into putting together a well-illustrated blog post.
As with blogs, a lot of this effort is wasted unless you get lucky. But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else. Even within a single platform, you usually have multiple tries. If you don't get noticed right away, there's still hope that someone else shares your content down the line.
In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once. If you don't already have a zillion subscribers, it shows your video to a couple of people, more or less at random. If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
There are surprisingly few venues for video content outside YT, at least not on a scale that would matter on YT! For example, if you want to get to the top of HN, non-video content has much better odds. Many tech- or science-centric subreddits discourage or ban videos too.
YT is a fairly closed ecosystem that's both insanely resource-intensive to participate in, and that doesn't give creators too many second chances. My specific claim is that it's more of a crapshoot than running a blog. There are so many great science visualizations with 50 views.
HN is relatively tiny and HN's allergy to video is not representative of the internet.
Just create clips from your video and post them on insta, tiktok, twitter, FB, etc. That's the internet at large. If people are interested, they'll watch the full video.
HN is small as a discussion community, but it is huge in terms of the traffic it generates to top-ranked URLs. There are fairly mainstream publications that optimize for HN, and I have spoken to marketers and PR people who described HN as by far the most significant source of traffic to their sites.
It doesn't necessarily translate to sales or lasting attention, but if you're after brand recognition or SEO, it's great. Spend some time on /newest to see how many organizations are desperate to get a piece of this.
It's not really that small and I don't know why people say that.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
> If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
As some counterexample anecdata, the YouTube algorithm is being quite generous to me lately, often giving me relatively low-view videos from years ago, some of which have been quite good. Maybe I'm just in a small a/b test, but it seems that videos do get multiple chances.
From what YouTube creators are saying lately subscriber counts don’t matter anymore. So even if you have a zillion subscribers you’re still almost completely at the mercy of the algorithm.
I assume that a considerable percentage of CS students or recent graduates (myself included, back in the day) dream about creating some sort of visualization tool, let alone an awesome one like this.
Does the serif font in manim have any ties to Hershey fonts or the BGI vector fonts packaged with 90s Borland products? I guess any TTF font can also be rendered line-by-line but the animation does remind me of BGI example code running on slow IBM PCs.
I'm quite certain the typeface is Computer Modern (the primary font being CMU Serif, to be precise). It can be found by Googling it. I also distribute the fonts as an NPM library, since they are OFL. [1]
Lately I often think about 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium and Kahn Academy, how much good they are doing to this world.
Imagine having close to an unlimited amount of money at your disposal and a media platform which is capable of reaching close to every person on this planet. To give people a voice in a community, if they dare to or if they feel the need to.
The only thing you then lack is a platform for organizing communities instead of sowing the seeds of hatred, to use the tools provided by people like Grant Sanderson, Derek Muller, Grady Hillhouse and others, in order to help communities to improve their communities, towns, cities, and so on. To help them solve their problems, make them understand how problematic corruption, greed and abuse of power is.
While I was born in Germany, I lived for around 20 years in Peru, since I was a child. People are poor, but very kind hearted, politicians and the wealthy are corrupt.
This is what makes me feel so sad about Elon Musk, specially knowing that he grew up in South Africa.
I'm going to find out a way to automatically hide comments referencing "musk". You can't even read about a 3Blue1Brown video without people somehow making it about him. Every thread, every day, it's just people talking about Elon Musk.
I don't understand the Musk comment at the end. Can you please explain what you mean by that and what is the significance of him growing up in South Africa?
I've done some porting between Python and JS based on Tensorflow in the past - and I suspect the poor ergonomics in JS for math/lists would probably ruin the experience a good amount.
Perhaps something like Pyodide can bridge the gap and make it easier to bring into the browser as well.
I had the chance to use Manim during my college undergraduate project, it was very scrappy, but the library was very intuitive to use. And now this makes me wonder if there are other similar libraries like Manim for these more videographic oriented production.
I absolutely love his voice. Its so calm and soothing that I can have his video running on the side while I am doing my chores and can still learn stuff.
Content creators like this deserve the recognition
"Content creator" is like calling a good cook "grub producer". I don't understand why youtubers themselves keep using it. Content is the emptiest word (and we shouldn't use it like that IMO).
Manim is incredibly cool, but my biggest takeaway from the video is how insane it is that Python apparently lets you reference a variable in a function that was defined outside the scope of the function.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but isn't that standard for pretty much every C-style language? Define a variable outside a function, parallel to the function, and even though that variable is outside the scope of the function it's still accessible inside the function. Or did you mean something else?
Python has nested functions which does allow access to the nest...er function's variables. The rest does conform to expectations, you get to use parameters, locally declared variables and globals.
3B1B is doing god's work. May his tribe increase!!
I personally have benefited enormously from so many of his YT videos. I wish this is how Mathematics was taught in high-schools, Engg schools.
<3 <3
It wouldn’t work for the vast majority of students. There’s a reason we teach things the way we do.
The traditional lecture does have a lot of value, however, we are also quite certain that the instructional experience can be improved through the addition of visualizations and simulations. This is especially true for interactive visualizations where the learner can ask, "What if ...", experiment, and see the results of their interactions.
The lecture format is very old and would not have persisted if it didn't provide a good value. At the same time, it's age also implies that there is room for improvement.
Haha, the way maths is taught at university hasn't changed in centuries.
Let's not pretend this has all been figured out and perfected. Heck, most maths professors I encountered in my studies could trace their scientific lineage straight back to C.F.Gauss[1] and that's how they taught. Don't get me wrong, some were great teachers, others not so much, but there are valid alternatives to the classic lecture.
[1] https://www.mathgenealogy.org/index.php
Strict adherence to old methods due to overly restrictive and risk-averse governing bodies in educational institutions?
> There’s a reason we teach things the way we do
Is it that nobody kwen how to make good videos before? Or do you mean that teaching cannot be improved?
The Gutenberg Method of teaching acknowledges the existence of the printing press and suggests one person standing at the front telling everyone what to write down may be outdated
https://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~key/PHY1600/PER%20Papers/Ef...
That’s a wild take
Mind elaborating on what that reason is? Otherwise this comment just comes off as a drive-by dismissal…
what's the reason it doesn't work??
It's funny how, after years of hearing his voice and not seeing his face, seeing his face puts me in smack in the middle of the uncanny valley.
I feel like quite a few of the content creators I watch are starting to “show their face”, though the big one that comes to mind is the Real Engineering guy. A few of his newest videos have had him acting a bit like a host, interviewer and narrator.
It’s also weird when some of these creators swap with somebody else, like veratasium has had his producer do some of the videos instead.
The big reveal would be AvE.
I noticed a few of the people I watch revealed their face last year before the big collab with Mark Rober.
I used to like AvE till COVID. Then he became an anti-masker conspiratorial nutjob.
Always felt AvE stayed the same person he always, the same kind of commentary he always made. Low gov man with low gov sentiments.
I mean, kind of sounds like he never really changed, just your opinion of him did.
Framed differently, it sounds like the youtuber opportunisticially divulged some of their true thoughts on topics slowly over time that would have alienated members of their audience had they known who and what they were initially supporting. Pretty cowardly, but not an uncommon tactic amongst his similar peers.
In light of receiving new information that goes against your own tenants against poorly researched misinformation, changing your opinion isn't really a noteworthy response.
> Framed differently
Framed in an insane way by someone looking to denigrate someone they don't like. I have no idea who you're targeting but you obviously have a chip on your shoulder.
Duly noted.
From what I've seen about AvE he was mostly against the (batshit insane) reaction from the federal government to the truckers convoy in Ottawa. That's the only video that he made specifically about COVID I think (I don't know if he mentioned something else in other videos though). Not sure if that makes him a nutjob lol
Early on he made fun of people who wore masks. I'd watched almost every video for years before that but as one of many impacted by others not taking covid seriously, I went cold turkey.
His commencement addresses might really freak you out, then! See e.g. https://youtu.be/z7GVHB2wiyg
One of the best commencement speeches I’ve seen.
He featured multiple times before with Matt Parker and Brady Haran (NF), strange that you missed it. Although I guess even in this niche channel preferences vary wildly.
What's NF? ChatGPT thinks it refers to Numberphile in this comment, but wouldn't that be NP? I've never seen Numberphile abbreviated as NF.
My bad, ph is not my first language’s foneme.
I'm assuming Numberphile indeed, as that's the most likely for a Brady Haran channel with 3b3b as a guest.
Yes, Numberphile, as confirmed by looking up Brady Haran in Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Haran
This means you missed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOCsdhzo6Jg which is hillarious
Especially because when narrating the audio is better than someone being filmed casually, that small difference can get really weird
Same same, now imagine him singing… https://youtu.be/djzKCZHeVjY?si=mw0P14f_hUE_kIlW
I love that people like this exist.
It was impressive how he spotted a bug in his rendering engine and found a workaround for it in realtime!
https://youtu.be/rbu7Zu5X1zI?feature=shared&t=693
To me it appeared more like he was aware of a limitation in the new rendering logic he was working on in the backend, and that he knew a simple (high level) workaround.
Still impressive work :)
He knew about the bug, but developing this software is not his main job, producing videos is.
The fact that he knew the place, the reason, and came up with a workaround live demonstrates that he invests time into improving his toolkit. And not occasionally, but actively.
I still believe it is cool.
In larger companies this is how arsonist-firefighter engineers look impressive... fixing a bug they are responsible for while in a highly visible position
I was the young "tech guy" inside the business development department at Earthlink in the mid 90s. The bizdev folks would propose ideas and I would think them through and realize there were technical issues, and when I shared my concerns, they would all be disheartened. But, sometime later, I would figure out a way around the "problem". They were perpetually grateful, but after a number of these iterations, I got the sense that I was mainly solving problems that I had invented. I actually even shared my concern about that with my boss, and he dismissed it – I think they enjoyed the rollercoaster ride.
Omg I would love to make an explainer on bridging algorithms[1] with this tool! I've been a huge fan of their use in participatory democracy processes since 2016 (using tools like Pol.is), and have wanted to make a contribution to increasing literacy around the foundational math involved <3
Had I known about Manim back when his Summer of Math Exposition[2] was happening, I def would have dived in!
[1]: https://bridging.systems/
[2]: https://some.3b1b.co/
I had no idea this existed, thanks so much for the link! Reading their paper right now, and I'd love to see your explainer once you make it :) My website is linked from my profile, send me a link on social media if you ever get around to making that explainer!
What is the actual math involved? From following the link in [1] I found almost no math content.
I'd watch if you made it. Big fan of pol.is : )
This seems like some kind of NGO word salad slop dressing itself up with a bit of extraneous math notation; this is almost exactly the opposite of the type of stuff 3B1B covers in his videos, or that (I must imagine) Manim is optimized for.
I’m amazed at how much production goes into each of his videos. His YouTube play button is well deserved.
It's also what bums me out about YouTube. There is an insane amount of effort that goes into producing high-quality videos - orders of magnitude more than would go into putting together a well-illustrated blog post.
As with blogs, a lot of this effort is wasted unless you get lucky. But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else. Even within a single platform, you usually have multiple tries. If you don't get noticed right away, there's still hope that someone else shares your content down the line.
In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once. If you don't already have a zillion subscribers, it shows your video to a couple of people, more or less at random. If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
A YouTube video has a URL though. So just like a blog post, you can share it on all the same sites you mentioned with blog posts.
Plus you have the built-in audience of YouTube and the algorithm that can help with discovery..
"Build it and they will come" has never been true, for videos or blogs...
There are surprisingly few venues for video content outside YT, at least not on a scale that would matter on YT! For example, if you want to get to the top of HN, non-video content has much better odds. Many tech- or science-centric subreddits discourage or ban videos too.
YT is a fairly closed ecosystem that's both insanely resource-intensive to participate in, and that doesn't give creators too many second chances. My specific claim is that it's more of a crapshoot than running a blog. There are so many great science visualizations with 50 views.
HN is relatively tiny and HN's allergy to video is not representative of the internet.
Just create clips from your video and post them on insta, tiktok, twitter, FB, etc. That's the internet at large. If people are interested, they'll watch the full video.
HN is small as a discussion community, but it is huge in terms of the traffic it generates to top-ranked URLs. There are fairly mainstream publications that optimize for HN, and I have spoken to marketers and PR people who described HN as by far the most significant source of traffic to their sites.
It doesn't necessarily translate to sales or lasting attention, but if you're after brand recognition or SEO, it's great. Spend some time on /newest to see how many organizations are desperate to get a piece of this.
It's not really that small and I don't know why people say that.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
I've discovered so much content on YouTube that I would never have found if it was on someone's blog.
And on top of that I also find YT content through social media, blogs, forums, etc..
So I hear you, but I guess based on my own experience, I disagree! But that's cool, we can do that. :-)
> If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
As some counterexample anecdata, the YouTube algorithm is being quite generous to me lately, often giving me relatively low-view videos from years ago, some of which have been quite good. Maybe I'm just in a small a/b test, but it seems that videos do get multiple chances.
From what YouTube creators are saying lately subscriber counts don’t matter anymore. So even if you have a zillion subscribers you’re still almost completely at the mercy of the algorithm.
I assume that a considerable percentage of CS students or recent graduates (myself included, back in the day) dream about creating some sort of visualization tool, let alone an awesome one like this.
Sometimes knowing how to do something isn't nearly as important as badly wanting to do something
For some it can be far easier to find knowledge than it is to find motivation
Ive been working on for like 4 years now :[
Does the serif font in manim have any ties to Hershey fonts or the BGI vector fonts packaged with 90s Borland products? I guess any TTF font can also be rendered line-by-line but the animation does remind me of BGI example code running on slow IBM PCs.
I'm quite certain the typeface is Computer Modern (the primary font being CMU Serif, to be precise). It can be found by Googling it. I also distribute the fonts as an NPM library, since they are OFL. [1]
[1]: https://github.com/stevenpetryk/computer-modern
Ah, so it has TeX/Metafont origins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
Lately I often think about 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium and Kahn Academy, how much good they are doing to this world.
Imagine having close to an unlimited amount of money at your disposal and a media platform which is capable of reaching close to every person on this planet. To give people a voice in a community, if they dare to or if they feel the need to.
The only thing you then lack is a platform for organizing communities instead of sowing the seeds of hatred, to use the tools provided by people like Grant Sanderson, Derek Muller, Grady Hillhouse and others, in order to help communities to improve their communities, towns, cities, and so on. To help them solve their problems, make them understand how problematic corruption, greed and abuse of power is.
While I was born in Germany, I lived for around 20 years in Peru, since I was a child. People are poor, but very kind hearted, politicians and the wealthy are corrupt.
This is what makes me feel so sad about Elon Musk, specially knowing that he grew up in South Africa.
Now think about how our society is set up to allocate resources to people like Musk rather than people like Sanderson.
I'm going to find out a way to automatically hide comments referencing "musk". You can't even read about a 3Blue1Brown video without people somehow making it about him. Every thread, every day, it's just people talking about Elon Musk.
I don't understand the Musk comment at the end. Can you please explain what you mean by that and what is the significance of him growing up in South Africa?
Wow. I really wish this were a JavaScript library so we could play with this in a browser and publish 3D animations to the browser.
Check out Motion Canvas[0] by Jacob from aarthificial, prolific coder and animator [1].
[0]: https://motioncanvas.io/
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@aarthificial
I've done some porting between Python and JS based on Tensorflow in the past - and I suspect the poor ergonomics in JS for math/lists would probably ruin the experience a good amount.
Perhaps something like Pyodide can bridge the gap and make it easier to bring into the browser as well.
It would probably be easier to add an 'export to js' option to Manim than to try to create an ergomic js library.
Motion Canvas might be a great fit: https://motioncanvas.io/
One of the best math communicators out there!
Could having students create their own videos using A Manim explaining aspects of maths be a good way to teach maths?
Or would it be more cumbersome and the tools be a distraction or impediment to understanding?
The latter, too much effort would be spent on non-math stuff. Maybe wouldn't be an impediment, just very inefficient
I think 1-1 oral exams are the most accurate way to assess understanding.
I had the chance to use Manim during my college undergraduate project, it was very scrappy, but the library was very intuitive to use. And now this makes me wonder if there are other similar libraries like Manim for these more videographic oriented production.
Link to Manim: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
and the community fork: https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim
I absolutely love his voice. Its so calm and soothing that I can have his video running on the side while I am doing my chores and can still learn stuff.
Content creators like this deserve the recognition
This guy is a natural born educator. 'Content creator' doesn't begin to describe his value to society.
"Content creator" is like calling a good cook "grub producer". I don't understand why youtubers themselves keep using it. Content is the emptiest word (and we shouldn't use it like that IMO).
Voices like that must have a big impact on success, right? Both on youtube and for podcasts
That latest hologram video is one of the best quality YouTube videos I've ever seen
Manim is incredibly cool, but my biggest takeaway from the video is how insane it is that Python apparently lets you reference a variable in a function that was defined outside the scope of the function.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but isn't that standard for pretty much every C-style language? Define a variable outside a function, parallel to the function, and even though that variable is outside the scope of the function it's still accessible inside the function. Or did you mean something else?
Python has nested functions which does allow access to the nest...er function's variables. The rest does conform to expectations, you get to use parameters, locally declared variables and globals.
It's a whole subject in language design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)