SIGGRAPH Talk + September update

Hey everyone,

Above is a recording for a remote talk I did for SIGGRAPH this year, for anyone who is curious. Apologies for the sound quality, something about the mixture of my mic's settings and Zoom seemed not to mesh well, but hopefully, it's not too terrible.

The finalized version of the video on Newton's fractal (teased in the last post) will be coming shortly. I ended up adding a fair bit, and with some help from the patron Sergey Shemyakov, I got sucked into a rabbit hole of learning much about the nature of holomorphic dynamics. The main goal I had was to be able to provide some kind of answer for why you get complicated shapes at all, which is actually an unexpectedly answerable question, and to also describe some added context for what other pieces of math that whole line of inquiry relate to.

Much of September was spent finalizing things associated with the Summer of Math Exposition. I've now chosen winners, and the plan is to publish the video announcing them shortly after this next normal 3b1b video (the thought is that putting those out in close succession may help drive more traffic to those winners). 

Honestly, I was blown away by the outcome of the whole event. We had over 1,200 total submissions, which is outstanding. I set aside some time to look closely at the top 100 and provide some feedback and was really impressed with the quality. Choosing winners there was one of the hardest things I've had to do all year, which I suppose is a good sign. All in all the event involved a ton of work, but given the projects to come out of it, I think it was well worth it. We're strongly considering doing it again next year, details TBD.

Once I put out the video summarizing the whole event and announcing winners, we'll have a playlist ready with all entries, and a place on the website including links to all non-video entries, so stay tuned there!

-Grant