lecture

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.

Donald Knuth's 2017 Christmas Tree Lecture at Stanford about a combinatorial geometry problem whose computed numbers matched a striking formula. He tells the story of the conjecture and its sequel.

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer who was dying of cancer, gives his 'Last Lecture' about achieving childhood dreams and living well. The recording is a full-length talk of about 104 minutes.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on the biological underpinnings of religiosity, from his human behavioral biology course. It covers theories linking religion to stress, and schizotypal traits.

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 first of Richard Feynman's 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell, 'The Character of Physical Law', covering the law of gravitation. Feynman traces the history from Kepler and Newton to the universality of the inverse-square law. The recording is an older one with weak audio.

The first lecture of MIT's 6.001 (SICP) with Abelson and Sussman, giving an overview of the course and an introduction to Lisp. It argues that computer science is about managing complexity and abstraction, not computers.

The first lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning course, setting out the Cold War context for his theory of belief and culture. He introduces the narrative structure of culture and archetypal characters for the individual, the known and the unknown.

The first lecture of Francis Su's Harvey Mudd real analysis course, covering the construction of the rational numbers. It begins a full lecture series that follows a standard analysis text.

The opening lecture of Ian Shapiro's Yale course Power and Politics in Today's World, which examines political dynamics and institutions over the past quarter century, including inequality, declining unions and new forms of authoritarianism.

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.

First lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.

Lecture 7A from MIT 6.001 (SICP) by Abelson and Sussman introduces the metacircular evaluator, a Scheme interpreter written in Scheme. It shows how evaluating a program is itself a program.

A recording of Richard Feynman's talk on the possibilities of manipulating matter at very small scales, widely seen as an early vision of nanotechnology. This is a later version of his 1959 "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

Randy Pausch's 2007 last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, given as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He reflects on achieving childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles and helping others reach theirs.

The first lecture of MIT's 1986 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, given by Harold Abelson, introducing Lisp and the idea of computer science as the study of process.

A lecture from MIT's Missing Semester course covering version control with git. It builds up git from its data model rather than from commands.

A lecture by Richard Feynman on how computers work, using the analogy of a filing clerk that becomes progressively dumber and faster. It also covers heuristics and how computers handle data and solve problems in finite time.

John Ousterhout's slides-and-voiceover lecture on Paxos, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It is a full introduction to the Paxos consensus algorithm.

The opening lecture of MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems (Spring 2020), introducing the course and core challenges of distributed systems. It begins a playlist that goes on to cover Raft and other consensus papers in Go.

Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch gives a lecture on time management at the University of Virginia in 2007. He covers practical habits such as tackling important tasks first and distinguishing important from urgent work.

Sean Carroll's 2013 Fermilab Users Meeting lecture on particles, fields and the future of particle physics. He explains that particles are vibrations in underlying quantum fields and touches on the Higgs, neutrinos and dark matter.

The first lecture in an 18-part series on digital photography from Marc Levoy's Stanford CS 178 course, recorded at Google in 2016. The series covers how digital cameras work and computational photography, with slides and assignments available on the course site.

John Ousterhout lectures on the Raft consensus algorithm, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It covers leader election and log repair.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.006 lecture introducing dynamic programming through Fibonacci numbers and shortest paths. It covers memoization, subproblems and optimal substructure.

The opening lecture of the How to Start a Startup course at Stanford, with Sam Altman covering ideas and products and Dustin Moskovitz discussing why to start a startup.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS107 Programming Paradigms, taught by Jerry Cain, giving an overview of the course. The course goes from C and assembly through C++, concurrency, Scheme and Python.

Jordan Peterson's first lecture in his Biblical Series examines the idea of God as sovereignty and power abstracted from any individual ruler, and as the pattern inherent in human dominance hierarchies.

Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker gives the 2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture at Illinois. He discusses the gap between academic research and industry problems, publishing incentives, and the influence of large industry users on research.

Lecture 1 of Harvard's Statistics 110 with Joe Blitzstein, introducing sample spaces, the naive definition of probability, counting, binomial coefficients and the sampling table.

Christof Paar's university lecture introducing Galois fields and finite-field arithmetic as used in AES. It covers the mathematics behind the AES S-box.

The first lecture of David MacKay's Cambridge course on information theory, pattern recognition and neural networks. It introduces the core ideas of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

The first lecture of an MIT course on Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, covering themes like self-reference, recursion and incompleteness. The full lecture series is on YouTube.

A special lecture from MIT's Private Pilot Ground School in which Lt. Col. Randy Gordon, a fighter and test pilot, describes F-22 flight controls. Topics include thrust vectoring, the pilot command system and how software handles failures.

A lecture for high school seniors and college freshmen making the case for nuclear power and answering common objections. It is an overview of the channel's more detailed videos on each topic.

A UC Berkeley CS 161 lecture by Nicholas Weaver on cryptocurrency and blockchains, covering how they work and the case against them. It is aimed at a computer security course audience.

Lecture 1B of MIT's 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1986) with Gerald Sussman, covering procedures, processes and the substitution model. It includes the line about the power of naming things.

Paul Graham's lecture in the 'How to Start a Startup' course, covering counterintuitive parts of startups and how to have ideas. It is the video form of his essay 'Before the Startup'.

Lecture 7A of the 1986 MIT 6.001 SICP course, with Gerald Sussman presenting the metacircular evaluator, part 1. It shows how a Lisp evaluator can be written in Lisp itself.