machine learning math

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths demonstrates MENACE, Donald Michie's 1961 machine made of matchboxes that learns to play noughts and crosses through reinforcement. He builds and trains a physical version.

3Blue1Brown's first chapter on deep learning explains what neurons and layers are and the math underlying a basic neural network, using handwritten digit recognition with visual animations.

An animated 11-minute tour of the whole field of mathematics as a single map, showing how pure and applied math and their sub-fields relate to each other.

3Blue1Brown's second neural network chapter explains cost functions and gradient descent, showing how a network learns by minimizing error during training.

3Blue1Brown's third deep learning chapter gives a visual, intuitive account of backpropagation and what happens to a neural network as it learns. A follow-up video covers the underlying calculus.

Mathologer examines the infamous Numberphile claim that 1+2+3+... equals -1/12, explaining what is wrong with the calculation and how it connects to real math like the zeta function and analytic continuation.

Mathologer shows how times table diagrams on a circle produce cardioids and other curves connected to the Mandelbrot set. He explains the patterns and links to a tool for making your own diagrams.

3Blue1Brown explores infinite sums from convergent to divergent, with an introduction to the 2-adic metric, themed on the cycle between discovering and inventing mathematics.

3Blue1Brown explains space-filling curves and the Hilbert curve, and how infinite mathematical constructions connect to finite, practical approximations. It touches on mapping between dimensions and sensory ideas.

Vsauce explores math through card tricks and big numbers, including an animation of how enormous 52 factorial, the number of deck orderings, really is.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains single-pile Nim and the trick that wins it, using Dr NIM, a 1960s mechanical plastic computer that plays perfectly. He teaches the strategy so viewers can beat friends.

3Blue1Brown walks through a very hard Putnam competition problem and its elegant solution, emphasizing the visual intuition and the thought process behind solving it.

3Blue1Brown's chapter 4 on deep learning gives a more formal, symbol-based account of backpropagation calculus, connecting the intuition from the previous chapter to the math found in textbooks and code.

3kliksphilip summarizes Valve's GDC talk on VACNet, a deep-learning system that flags CS:GO cheaters and feeds the Overwatch review queue. It covers Trust Factor, VAC, and how the data is collected and analyzed.

Veritasium short showing Drew Berry's scientifically accurate animations of the molecular machines that drive cell division. It walks through mitosis, chromosomes and motor proteins.

Mathologer examines how identities like 1+2+3+... = -1/12 arise in Ramanujan's work, starting from his 1913 letter to Hardy. The video explains the rules for summing infinite series and why such results are meaningful but not naive sums.

Mathologer uses continued fractions to show why the golden ratio is the most irrational number, comparing it with root 2, e and pi and pointing to where this shows up in nature.

Mathologer explains epicycles and complex Fourier series, inspired by an animation of Homer Simpson drawn with epicycles. It covers the shape of the Moon's orbit around the Sun and how to make your own epicycle drawings.

An illustrated 23-minute summary of David Friedman's talk based on The Machinery of Freedom. It describes how law, police and courts could work as market services in a stateless society, covering private law, polycentric law and objections.

A PBS Infinite Series episode explaining the mathematics of quantum computers, including how qubits store complex numbers and how quantum computation differs from classical computation. Hosted by Kelsey Houston-Edwards.

Two Minute Papers covers OpenAI's multi-agent hide-and-seek experiment, in which agents learned emergent tool use and found ways to break the game's rules. It summarizes the 'Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction' paper.

Matt Parker explains the history behind NTSC television running at 29.97 frames per second rather than 30, tracing it to the backward-compatible addition of color. He walks through the arithmetic behind the odd ratio.

Ray Dalio's 30-minute animated video explains how the economy works through credit, debt, interest rates, and short- and long-term cycles. It is based on his template for understanding the economy.

Episode 4 of Mike Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money, explaining how currency is created through a chain of IOUs among the Treasury, banks and the Federal Reserve. It covers bonds, Fed checks, debt, taxes and fractional reserve lending, from a gold-and-silver advocate's viewpoint.

A short Al Jazeera animation narrated by Amy Goodman presenting Noam Chomsky's five filters of the mass media: ownership, advertising, media elite sourcing, flak and a common enemy. It is part of the MediaTheorised series.

Numberphile's James Grime explains Cantor's result that some infinities are bigger than others, including why the reals outnumber the integers. It is a short, accessible introduction to countable and uncountable infinity.

Robert Miles explains reward modelling, in which an AI learns what humans want from their preference comparisons instead of a hand-written reward function. He walks through the 2017 paper on deep reinforcement learning from human preferences.

Veritasium explores compliant mechanisms, devices that move by flexing rather than using hinges and joints, with researchers at BYU. It covers advantages such as fewer parts and precision, including uses in nuclear weapon safety.

A minutephysics video explaining why a piano cannot be perfectly tuned, comparing equal temperament with just intonation and the math of harmonics.

Veritasium examines research suggesting science explainer videos like Khan Academy's make students feel they understand while tests show they have not learned, because misconceptions go unaddressed. It suggests how to partly fix this.

minutephysics, in collaboration with the US Census Bureau, explains differential privacy and why the 2020 census adds noise to protect individuals' data. It walks through how statistics can leak private information.

3Blue1Brown, in collaboration with minutephysics, introduces the math of superposition and quantum states using polarized light. It builds up the quantum behavior of photons as a simple counting and probability problem.

Numberphile with Tadashi Tokieda on the Trinity Hall Prime, a prime number whose digits form a picture of the college's coat of arms, left as a gift by a departing mathematician.

A short TED-Ed animated lesson by Anita Collins on what happens in the brain when people play a musical instrument. It argues that playing engages many brain areas at once, like a full-body workout, with long-term benefits.

A Veritasium explainer on how the brain works and how we learn. It is inspired by Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and covers System 1 and System 2 thinking and why harder learning builds skill.

Two Minute Papers covers a paper on speeding up fluid and smoke simulation with convolutional networks. It contrasts the approach with earlier regression forest methods.

A short Harvard Online animation, narrated by Professor Rob Lue, showing how ATP synthase works inside mitochondria. It comes from the HarvardX Cell Biology: Mitochondria course.

Yuta asks whether native Japanese speakers can actually write kanji by hand, showing that many struggle to recall characters from memory.

A 21-minute animation showing how a sphere can be turned inside out without creases or tears, known as sphere eversion.

A short animation from the DNA Learning Center showing how mRNA carries a gene's message to the ribosome, where tRNA and codons are used to assemble amino acids into a protein.