3blue1brown

How They Fool Ya

Happy tau day! 

I posted this as a secret video to patreon a few years ago. It's a recording from when I was in London and Matt Parker invited me to do an act for his “Evening of Unnecessary Detail”. I had some vague that that one day it might be nice to record a better version bef...

Adding random variable, and continuous convolutions (Early view for patrons)

Hey everyone,

Continuing with the theme of probability videos, which I plan to eventually coalesce into a proper series sometime this year, this next video covers adding random variables. That is to say, convolutions.

Initially, I intended for this to be "part 2" to the convolution vi...

Stanford Math Department Commencement Speech

I had the honor and pleasure of being invited to deliver an address for the mathematics graduation ceremony at Stanford. In it, I chose to talk about one of the lesser-addressed and awkward-to-talk-about motivations for getting into math.

May Update

Hey everyone,

I was really hoping to have the next video out to you by now. It'll be about convolutions in the continuous case, with a focus on what makes Gaussian distributions special and why they pop up in the central limit theorem. You should be seeing a draft of that within the next we...

Thoughts on AI art

The most recent video I published made some use of AI art. I wanted to write some reflections on that, more to clarify my own thoughts than anything else. Feel no obligation to read it all, I know you're subscribed here for math...

SoME3 begins!

Today we're kicking off the third Summer of Math Exposition, SoME3. It's an event to encourage more people to create online math explanations, with prizes and a chance to have your work surfaced to a larger audience. Learn more at https://s...

Shorts

Suppose that over the last few years, there's been an exponential rise in the amount of opium usage. It's especially prevalent among the youth. You've started to notice as you walk through airports and look at how people twiddle away their time, sneaking the occasional glance over the shoulder of...

JPBM Communications Award Lecture, JMM 2023

Hey everyone,

Early this year I had the honor of receiving a communications award from the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics, along with Jordan Ellenberg. A few of you asked if the talk I gave ...

Early view, why π is in the normal distribution (beyond integral tricks)

Hey everyone,

Here's an early view for the next video, exploring the pi inside the normal distribution. We start with a classic proof, due to Poisson, then make an attempt to go further to show how this proof relates to a derivation for where the gaussian distribution comes from in the firs...

Central Limit Theorem (early view)

(Update: Thanks for all the feedback everyone, the final version is now live!)

Hey everyone,

Originally, my aim was to finish the video about how the pi in the formula for a normal distribution is related to the central limit theorem by, well, pi day. The way it shook out instead is t...

Prime number races

Hey everyone,

The third in a little sequence I did with Numberphile about patterns which eventually break is now published. This one is about racing prime numbers in different residue classes, with an intuition for why some of these classes seem to have a systematic advantage.

For tho...

Any requests for what to include in a central limit theorem video?

Hey everyone,

What began as the follow-on to the convolutions video has become a video about the central limit theorem. In particular, I'd like to show how a certain perspective on convolutions makes it easier to "see" why the function e^(-x^2) is the one that shows up so prominently in sta...

Manim Q&A Tomorrow

Hi everyone,

Following up on the last post, I'll be doing the Manim Q&A as a live stream tomorrow (Saturday) at 1 pm Pacific time. Here's 2023-02-03 23:21:42 +0000 UTC View Post

Manim Q&A

Wonderful patrons,

Despite my original plans, I spent a fair bit of this month continuing with efforts I began in December to improve manim. Given that I've been putting so much time int...

JMM, year-end reflections, and what I've been up to

JMM

I'll be at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Boston next week. If any of you are attending and would like to meet up, please feel free to send me a DM or email me.

On Thursday, January 5th, I'm giving a lecture there in association with having been chosen for the 2023 JPBM Commun...

New video! But what is a convolution?

Hey Everyone,

As promised, here's a new video going deeper into convolutions, and in what sense the FFT algorithm can be used to speed up their computation. Originally the plan was to do an overview of both the discrete and continuous cases, but there was enough material I wanted to cover t...

A few Numberphile videos + Final version of Borwein integrals

Hey folks,

I recently made a few videos with Numberphile, the first of which is posted above. The second one is here, and the third will be out in the not-too-distant future. Each one is about some pattern related to prime...

A bizarre integral pattern (early view)

Hey everyone,

Here's a rough cut for a new video, about a strange series of computations that compute pi...until they don't.

As always, comments and feedback are welcome. I still have yet to do a proper comb-through for little errors, and there are a number of animations I'll amend, s...

Summer of Math Exposition conclusion

In this video I talk about the results of the summer of math exposition, and highlight four criteria for what I think makes a math video (or article) great. Enjoy!

August update

Hello patrons,

First off, I want to express a bit of guilt for not having any new videos out this month. Knowing that the current pace of output probably does not live up to the spirit of the generous pledges you all have made, if any of you would like a refund on the pledges for the last m...

The epic of Galois

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for forwarding along the request for artists I posted last week! It did manage to surface some great contributors who can help.

I've sprinkled several vague mentions of "a project about Galois" here and there in past posts this year, but it might be worth laying...

Seeking more artists

TL;DR, if you know any freelance digital artists who might want to help with with a 3blue1brown project, can you share this application with them?

--

As I've mentioned in previous posts, the big project for th...

How to lie using visual proofs

Since the channel centers so heavily on visual intuition and visual proofs, it seems only right to give a few examples of where visual proofs can lead you astray.

Summer of Math Exposition #2

Hey Everyone,

Last year, Jame Schloss and I organized what we called the Summer of Math Exposition (SoME1), a contest for online math explainers. I can't tell you how fun and rewarding it was to see the quality of some of the entries, so we're doing it again. (See last year's 2022-06-13 14:26:40 +0000 UTC View Post

Olympiad level counting

Hey everyone,

Thanks for all your feedback on the draft of this one. I was able to incorporate much of it, and it certainly made it better, so I appreciate the thought that so many of you put into responses.

The most notable changes for the final version come in the form of motivation...

New puzzle video, and updates on the rest

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a new video draft (linked above), and some updates on what's been new in 3blue1brown.

Puzzle video and messing with new workflows

I spent some time this month updating manim (the animation software behind the channel) to try out s...

Happy pi day, with "Death's Dice"

Happy pi day folks. With the two projects happening now, there wasn't quite room to do a full video in celebration of the day this year. But I did want to share a fun "surprise pi" occurrence, this one in the form of a simple 2022-03-14 17:42:06 +0000 UTC View Post

New hire, and upcoming projects

Hey everyone, I thought I'd pass along a few updates for what's new and coming up in 3blue1brown land.

First off, I hired an artist this year, Kurt Bruns, both to help outsource some of the production and to extend the visual style in a new direction. He was the one who did the drawings for...

Oh, wait, actually the best Wordle opener is not “crane”…

Hey Everyone,

I put together a brief follow-on to last week's video, talking about a small bug which influenced the choice of what starting guess is optimal. Really, though, it's an excuse to go into a bit more detail on what went into that final analysis.

Some Wordle fun (rough cut)

Hey everyone,

I decided to do a digression from the main project I was working on most of January to do a "quick" little video using Wordle as an excuse to teach some information theory.  Here's a preview of the rough cut, which I'll aim to finalize today and publish tomorrow. If you c...