learning math

The first lecture of Andrew Ng's Stanford CS229 Machine Learning course, giving an overview of the course. It introduces supervised and unsupervised learning, learning theory and reinforcement learning.

The first lecture of Gilbert Strang's MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra course, covering the geometry of linear equations. It opens a full 35-lecture university course.

A short vintage film clip of Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on using computers to spark children's imagination and learning.

Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs, shares stories from messy real-world jobs in this TED talk. He argues that hard work has been unjustly degraded in society.

A Nike commercial in which Michael Jordan lists the shots he missed and games he lost, saying that repeated failure is the reason he succeeds.

Alan Kay's TED talk on teaching ideas, in which he argues the world is not what it seems and shows children learning through programming and building their own lessons with Etoys/Squeak.

Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.

Harvard physicist Eric Mazur explains how he realized his students were memorizing rather than understanding, and how he changed his teaching. He presents peer instruction and data showing improved student performance.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

Peter Norvig, then Director of Research at Google, talks at Startup School 2008 about leveraging large amounts of data and about technical challenges in Google projects such as image search. A central idea is that data can beat hand-written programming.

Douglas Crockford's 2009 Google tech talk on the good and bad parts of JavaScript, based on his book. He argues for using a reliable subset of the language and avoiding its flawed features.

An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.

A bot built by Robin Baumgarten plays Infinite Mario using A* path-finding, shown as a red planned path that updates as new obstacles appear. It won the Mario AI competitions and uses only on-screen information.

The first lecture of Leonard Susskind's Stanford Continuing Studies course on modern physics, beginning with classical mechanics. It is the start of a six-quarter sequence on the theoretical foundations of physics.

The introductory lecture of Stephen Boyd's Stanford Convex Optimization I course (EE 364A). It outlines convex sets, functions and problems, and the course's coverage of least-squares, linear and semidefinite programming, duality and interior-point methods.

A score-following video of Iannis Xenakis's 1950s orchestral piece Metastasis, showing his graphic, mathematically derived notation as the music plays. It is a landmark of post-war modernist composition.

A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, including its desktop, icons, documents, networking and printing. The uploader argues that Apple's later Lisa and Mac interfaces evolved from these ideas rather than copying them.

Second half of a demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface. It shows how the Star differed from the later Lisa and Mac interfaces, with strengths in networking and printing and little direct manipulation.