math magic

Conrad Wolfram argues that the part of math taught in schools, hand calculation, is tedious and mostly irrelevant to real mathematics. He proposes teaching math through computer programming so students can tackle real problems.

Matt Parker's Royal Institution talk based on his book Humble Pi, covering everyday mathematical mistakes and spurious patterns that went wrong in engineering and software. It mixes stand-up comedy with stories of coincidence and error.

A surreal multimedia TEDxSarasota performance by Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz, held on 12/12/12, mixing performance art with talk about imagination and creativity.

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard explains why he believes the Lean theorem prover will shape the future of mathematics, and describes digitizing his university curriculum in Lean with undergraduates, plus the cultural challenges.

Brian Warner, author of magic-wormhole, presents the tool at PyCon 2016. He explains how a few secret words let two computers securely transfer files, covering the cryptography (NaCl, SPAKE2) and library use.

Mathematician Hannah Fry's TED talk on patterns in dating and mate-seeking, including optimal stopping and three math-backed tips for finding a partner.

Matt Parker gives a hands-on Royal Institution talk on how four-dimensional shapes appear in a 3D world, with props like straw frames, Mobius strips and a knitted hat. It is a playful general-audience tour of the fourth dimension.

Gerald Jay Sussman speaks at Dan Friedman's 60th birthday celebration about how programming helps formulate and clarify ideas. He argues that ambiguous mathematical notation hinders understanding.

A HOPE09 talk on how modern computer chips are manufactured, from 22nm transistors to ultra-clean fabs and the tricks used to pattern tiny features with light. It frames chipmaking as hacking electrical engineering and physics.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

Sandi Metz's RailsConf 2013 talk offers practical guidelines for deciding what to test and how, so tests stay cheap and stable. She argues for testing the public interface rather than implementation and using mocks appropriately.

Ruben Meerman presents a TEDx talk on the stoichiometry of weight loss, showing with lab demonstrations where fat goes when it is lost. He argues that most of it is exhaled as carbon dioxide.

Timothy Baldridge presents Pixie, a lightweight Lisp built on RPython, at Strange Loop 2015. It covers C interop, immutable data structures, fast startup and async-by-default IO.

A UCTV panel with endocrinologist Robert Lustig, dentist Cristen Kearns and health policy expert Laura Schmidt on how the US food system and sugar industry influence diet and health, including industry efforts to shape the science.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix keynotes the OMR 2017 marketing festival on big data and personality-based targeting in political campaigns. It was given before the company's scandal broke.

Hans Rosling makes the case that the washing machine was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution. Using Gapminder graphics, he shows how electricity and economic growth free up time for reading and learning.

Freya Holmer's Dutch Game Day 2023 talk asking why vectors can't be multiplied, building from complex numbers to a single axiom and arriving at geometric algebra, quaternions and multivectors.

Eugenia Cheng gives the opening keynote at Lambda World 2017, presenting category theory as very abstract algebra whose abstraction gives it broad applicability. She applies it to everyday questions including privilege and prejudice.

Tom LaGatta's talk on category theory at a 2014 LispNYC meetup, covering objects, morphisms and the basic ideas in an informal, conversational style. It runs about 97 minutes.

John Kitchin shows how Emacs org-mode with Python lets researchers combine narrative, math, figures and executable code in one document. It exports to LaTeX, HTML and PDF, and he used it for papers and e-books.

Damian Conway's hour-long keynote at the Perl conference, On the Shoulders of Giants, showing off Perl 6 (Raku) features with history, algorithms and a quantum math operator built with grammars. It is delivered with comic flair.

Felienne Hermans argues that Excel is the world's most popular programming language and shows how spreadsheets work as a pure functional language. She implements a few mathematical problems in spreadsheet formulas to illustrate why they are so powerful and approachable.

Liz Rice builds a container from scratch in about 100 lines of Go, showing that a container is not a lightweight VM but a set of Linux kernel features and flags.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.

David Sachs of InvenSense explains how gyroscopes, accelerometers and compasses work on their own and together, demonstrated on a modified Android handset. He covers sensor fusion algorithms and why rotation math such as Euler angles matters.

Peter Shor tells the story of how he discovered Shor's Algorithm, from his early mathematics days to the quantum factoring breakthrough. It was recorded at MIT at the Physics of Computation conference.

A five-minute TED talk by Rob Reid, who introduces Copyright Math, applying entertainment-industry piracy loss claims to produce absurd totals such as an $8 billion iPod.

Curtis Poe's FOSDEM talk arguing that day-to-day Perl 6 is far simpler than its enthusiasts' talk of exotic features suggests. He compares basic math and string handling across languages.

Erik Meijer argues that category theory is the mathematicians' version of interface-based design. He shows that Java 8 lambdas and method references form a Cartesian closed category.

Gernot Heiser presents seL4, a microkernel with a mathematical proof connecting security properties to the binary code, and explains what its open-sourcing means for users. It covers its roles as a microkernel, separation kernel and hypervisor.

Lawyer and musician Damien Riehl argues that music is math with a finite number of melodies, and describes how he and programmer Noah Rubin generated every possible melody and released them under CC0 to avoid accidental infringement claims.