math visualization

A short Great Big Story piece about Hagoromo, a Japanese chalk brand so prized that mathematicians stockpiled it, with some reportedly dealing it on the side. It tells the quirky tale of a writing tool whose supply became scarce.

A short demo of the Deep Visualization Toolbox, which shows the activations inside a convolutional neural network as it processes live camera input. Viewers see individual units responding to edges, faces and text.

A clip of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull saying the laws of Australia prevail over the laws of mathematics, regarding encryption. The audio is quiet in the second half.

A short NASA Goddard visualization from the GEOS-5 model showing a year of atmospheric carbon dioxide moving around the globe. It shows plumes from sources, hemispheric differences and seasonal swings as plants grow and die back.

A three-minute capture of SORTDEMO.BAS, the sorting visualization that shipped with QBasic. It animates insertion, bubble, heap, exchange, shell and quick sort with chiptune-like sound.

A short explainer showing what walking through walls would look like with movement in a fourth spatial dimension, using the 4D puzzle game Miegakure.

A parody in the Downfall meme format where Hitler rages over confusing topology terminology about open, closed and clopen sets. It was made for a math summer program.

A short MIT Math Lab video showing millimetric droplets bouncing and walking across a vibrating fluid bath, guided by their own pilot waves. These droplets show diffraction, tunneling and quantized orbits, which were once thought to belong only to quantum systems.

A four-minute tour of the TeXmacs scientific editor, showing math typing, figures, citations, a drawing tool, document styles, HTML export, presentations and animations.

Gary Garrett's stop-motion animation of his song Flying Dream, with notes arranged on a lattice of fifths and major thirds. It shows how harmony looks in just intonation, inspired by Harmonic Experience.

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 Danish university math revue music video that parodies Barbra Streisand to explain the Banach-Tarski paradox, with oranges multiplying on stage.

A spectrogram visualization of the sounds in a dial-up modem handshake, with an annotated image explaining each noise. It shows how the handshake's tones map to the negotiation steps.

An animation presenting a non-standard helical or vortex model of the solar system, in which the planets trail the Sun through space instead of orbiting in flat circles. The model is a non-conventional view that the author says differs from standard diagrams.

A short film made with cold neutron imaging at the Paul Scherrer Institut showing a moka pot brewing coffee, sped up four times. The neutron beam makes the water and steam inside the pot visible.

Jerobeam Fenderson shows how to draw a mushroom on an oscilloscope in XY mode using stereo audio, then animates it by modulating with a larger wave. Pd and Max4Live patches are provided.

A short animation reconstructing a planet's looping orbit using Ptolemy's epicycles and deferents, with the epicycles tracing out the face of Homer Simpson. It shows how enough circles can reproduce nearly any shape.

A short clip of Venetian Snares' track 'Look' from Songs About My Cats (2001), shown as a spectrogram. The audio encodes an image in its frequency content.

A one-minute clip from Cambridge's Prof. Holger Babinsky that debunks the equal transit time explanation of lift. It shows how air actually flows over a wing.

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.

The original trailer for Threads, the 1984 British TV film depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Sheffield. The trailer hints at the film's bleak tone.

A short minutephysics video explaining why bicycles stay upright. It looks at gyroscopic precession, head angle and centre of mass, and shows that bikes self-steer toward the direction they lean.

A one-minute visualization of a simulated ant colony in which ants follow pheromone trails, with the source code on GitHub. It shows emergent behavior arising from simple rules.

Find the Longest Path is a comedic song by Daniel J. Barrett, a Billy Joel parody that describes the NP-hard longest path problem in informal terms.

A NASA and Durham University supercomputer simulation suggesting the Moon may have formed within hours of a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body. It is one of the highest-resolution giant-impact simulations run.

A short research demo of Autonomous Intersection Management, a protocol in which self-driving cars reserve slots through an intersection instead of obeying signals or stop signs. It uses UT Austin's autonomous vehicle Marvin and a simulation to show cars crossing without stopping.

A one-minute clip of the Jurassic Park scene where a girl navigates the FSN 3D file manager on an SGI system and declares it a Unix system.