visual math

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.

Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.

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.

Christopher Domas's REcon 2013 talk on dynamic binary visualization for reverse engineering. He shows how rendering binary data as interactive visual maps and trigraphs reveals structure that hex dumps hide, leading to his Cantor.dust tool.

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.

Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

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.

A Google Tech Talk by Laurens van der Maaten, co-creator of t-SNE, on visualizing high-dimensional data by mapping it to two dimensions. It explains how the technique works and how it compares with other visualization approaches.

Adam Neely's Ableton Loop 2017 talk links rhythm, pitch and synaesthesia. He shows that polyrhythms sped up become chords, so tempo and pitch are related by ratios.

Michael Steil's 27c3 talk on reverse engineering the MOS 6502 from die shots into a transistor-level simulation, as in the Visual6502 project. It covers going from chip package to a digital model.

Simon Brown's Agile on the Beach 2019 talk presents the C4 model, a lightweight approach to diagramming software architecture with a shared vocabulary and simple notation.

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.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

Drew Berry shows scientifically accurate animations of molecular processes inside cells, such as DNA replication, at TEDxSydney.

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.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

Julia Galef uses pictures to explain Bayes' rule, then tells three personal stories showing how she applies it to improve her thinking.

Anna Rosling Rönnlund presents Dollar Street, a project photographing homes in dozens of countries, from stoves to beds to toilets, and sorting them by income. She shows how data visualization can change how we see the world.

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.

SciPy 2015 talk by Nathaniel Smith and Stefan van der Walt on choosing a new default colormap for Matplotlib. It covers why Jet misleads, how perceptual color spaces work, and how viridis was designed.

Jake Archibald's JSConf.Asia 2018 talk "In the Loop" explains the browser event loop, covering tasks, microtasks, requestAnimationFrame, and how rendering interleaves with JavaScript. It uses visual walkthroughs to show why code runs in surprising orders and why setTimeout fixes are unreliable.

Hans Rosling uses the Gapminder animated-data tool to debunk myths about world development, with sportscaster-like energy. It shows trends in health, income and child survival across countries.

The full 80-minute Macworld 2007 keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone. It includes the multitouch demos, visual voicemail and scrolling.

In this TED talk, Hans Rosling uses animated statistics to debunk myths about the developing world, showing how health and income have improved across countries.

Bret Victor's 2013 MIT Media Lab talk argues that the media we think with determine which thoughts are possible. He demos new representations for scientific papers, circuits, filters and signal processing.

Dan Abramov's talk on the wet codebase, using visualizations to show how removing all duplication too early produces wrong abstractions that are hard to unwind.

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.

Hans Rosling's TED@Cannes talk uses boxes and animated data graphics to show how world population will grow to about 9 billion. He argues that raising living standards for the poorest is what reduces population growth.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

In this TED talk, Lawrence Lessig argues that American politics is corrupted by Congress's dependence on funding from a tiny fraction of citizens. He uses rapid-fire visuals and calls for a bipartisan push to reclaim the Republic.

A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.

Andrew Ng presents unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, showing how algorithms can learn representations from unlabeled data instead of hand-designed features. He gives examples in vision and audio, including visualizations of features learned by successive layers.