mathologer

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.

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.

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 shows a simple idea, the commutator, that lets anyone who can solve the first layer design their own full Rubik's cube solution. The same idea carries over to other symmetric twisty puzzles such as the Megaminx.

The first chapter of 3Blue1Brown's Essence of Linear Algebra series, introducing vectors with animated geometric visuals. It begins a series that builds intuition for linear algebra from the basics.

3Blue1Brown's animated visual introduction to the Fourier Transform, showing how a signal breaks into frequency components.

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.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

Freya Holmer's 74-minute video essay on splines, covering Bezier curves, B-splines, derivatives and the different levels of continuity (C0, C1, C2), built with custom animation tools. She notes she did not cover non-uniform splines.

The full-length Numberphile interview with mathematician and hedge fund founder Jim Simons. He discusses his path from mathematics and codebreaking to founding Renaissance Technologies, his use of algorithms in markets, and his philanthropy.

3Blue1Brown explains the math and mechanics behind Bitcoin visually: ledgers, digital signatures, proof of work and the blockchain, building up a decentralized payment system from first principles.

A short Dyalog demonstration building Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL, step by step. It shows how array operations replace loops.

The first video of 3Blue1Brown's Essence of Calculus series, which builds toward integrals, derivatives, and the fundamental theorem of calculus from a simple geometry question. It aims to make viewers feel they could have invented calculus themselves.

Numberphile visits Cliff Stoll, the man behind ACME Klein Bottles, and sees how he stores a thousand glass Klein bottles in a crawlspace under his house. A remote-controlled forklift fetches them.

A five-minute preview of 3Blue1Brown's Essence of Linear Algebra series, which uses animation to build geometric intuition for topics from a standard linear algebra course.

An animated introduction to geometric algebra, presented as a language that can describe most of physics. It was made with manim and covers multivectors and how they generalize familiar tools like cross products and quaternions.

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

The first part of Welch Labs' series on imaginary numbers, presenting them as the natural extension of the number line into two dimensions. It covers the history and the math with strong visuals.

A 10-minute 3Blue1Brown chapter explaining the determinant as the factor by which a linear transformation scales area or volume. It builds the idea geometrically with animations before any formulas.

Veritasium's explainer on Godel's incompleteness theorems and the limits of mathematical proof, tracing set theory, Hilbert's program and the road to Turing and modern computing.

3Blue1Brown explains fractal dimension and shows why many fractals are not strictly self-similar. Self-similarity turns out to be a special case of the broader idea of fractional dimension.

Vsauce's roughly 24 minute explainer on the Banach-Tarski paradox, building from infinity and set theory to the decomposition of a sphere into pieces that form two spheres.

3Blue1Brown visualizes high-dimensional spheres to explain a surprising puzzle about how a sphere fits in a box as dimensions grow. It builds geometric intuition for counterintuitive properties of high-dimensional space.

A two-minute video of Conway's Game of Life running inside Conway's Game of Life, built from OTCA metapixels and Golly. It zooms smoothly between scales.

3Blue1Brown's chapter on eigenvectors and eigenvalues in the Essence of Linear Algebra series. It builds a visual intuition for what they mean, why an eigenbasis is useful, and ends with a puzzle.

Matt Parker talks Numberphile through the different kinds of numbers: algebraic, transcendental, computable, normal, and beyond. It shows how few numbers we can actually name or describe.

3Blue1Brown shows how the uncertainty principle arises from Fourier transforms. A wave packet cannot be narrow in both position and frequency, so the principle is a property of waves rather than of measurement.

3Blue1Brown builds visual intuition for quaternions, showing how to think about this four-dimensional number system using stereographic projection and rotations in 3D space. It is part one of a two-part series with an interactive companion site.

A Vsauce video exploring whether chairs exist, through metaphysics, mereology and the philosophy of categorizing objects. It runs about 38 minutes and cites academic work on ontology.

Numberphile talks with mathematician Ron Graham about the magnitude of Graham's number, building up from arrow notation to show how impossibly large it is. It is part of a series of videos on this number.

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.

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.

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.

An 11-minute animated introduction to P vs. NP and the wider landscape of complexity classes, inspired by the Complexity Zoo wiki. It assumes no background in computer science.

3Blue1Brown builds toy SIR models to simulate how an epidemic spreads and tests scenarios like social distancing, travel restrictions, central gathering places and quarantine. It was made during the early COVID-19 outbreak.

3Blue1Brown visualizes the Riemann zeta function and the analytic continuation that extends it beyond where its series converges, building toward the Riemann hypothesis.

3Blue1Brown explains why plotting primes in polar coordinates produces spiral patterns, using modular arithmetic, Dirichlet's theorem and rational approximations of pi.

Vsauce's Michael Stevens takes viewers past infinity using transfinite numbers, ordinals and cardinals, with input from mathematician Hugh Woodin. It is a fast-paced, mind-bending tour of different sizes of infinity.