3blue1brown

The great bloggification, SoME1, a podcast, and a promise that there are actual videos in the works

Added 2021-07-01 06:48:45 +0000 UTC

Hi everyone,

For anyone following closely, things might seem a little quiet on the 3blue1brown front, but under the hood, there's actually been quite a bit going on.

TL;DR:

- New website, which will include rich blog post versions of the videos.

- A contest encouraging people to make more math explanations online.

- A casual podcast about educational content creation.

- More videos on the way, I promise.

Bloggification

The main project this summer has been to revamp the website, with a focus on making written versions of the content. There are currently four interns on board for the summer to help, and much of the site redesign was thanks to Vince Rubinetti, who happens to also be the person who does the channel's music.

You can see a work-in-progress version of the site here. While many of the articles that have been in the works are not yet finalized, you can see a few samples here.

- Neural networks

- Who cares about topology

- Prime spirals

We will have notably more articles up by the end of July, at which point I'll probably "launch" the site, at least in the sense of swapping out where the domain "3blue1brown.com" points.

Why do this? One motive stems from my plans to turn some of the content into books eventually, expanding on it in ways that fit a written medium better than videos, and this is the first step. Already in reviewing some of the articles I've found myself adding new material, or filling out explanations here or there. In going over the article on topology, for example, I noticed a way that Klein bottles fit the story which simply must become a follow-on video one day.

I also personally prefer to read math than to watch it, especially for reference. While the videos are still the main priority, by far, and while I still expect the vast majority of people consuming the lessons to be doing so through the videos, I also believe offering the same lessons in this alternate format stands to broaden who they reach.

On top of that, I'd like the website to become more of a home for future experiments, and the previous bare-bones-Squarespace-built site really did not offer the flexibility for what I'd like. You can already see some of this in some of the articles above, and you'll see more through July, but I think certain interactive elements used judiciously can make for a very different kind of learning experience.

I won't go into the details, but like all projects, this grew well beyond my initial scheming. Just finding the interns turned out to be quite the process, as there were over 2,500 applications, and James and I took care to at the very least see each one. It was certainly worth it, though, as I could hardly be happier with who I found.

SoME1

Another project underway right now is a contest James and I are running to encourage more people to make math explanations online. Likely within the next week, I'll post an announcement specifying the details, where the long and short of it is that in mid-August, anyone who's interested can submit an online explainer they've made this summer, whether that's a video/blog post/game/etc. We'll select some of them as "winners" which I'll feature in a 3blue1brown video. We're calling it the "Summer of Math Exposition 1", or SoME1 for short. We've put together a discord space for people to organize, trade tips, nerd out on math topics they might cover, etc.

Podcast

When we were originally conceiving of SoME1, we thought it'd be nice to have something recurringly posted between the announcement and the submission deadline which could be encouraging to people along the way. So the idea came up to do a short podcast series where I chat with other content creators or mathematicians about topics that might be relevant to anyone thinking of getting started making online explainers.

The very first one I did was with Matt Parker, which you can get a sneak view of here. I was still getting the bearings then, e.g. I didn't have my proper mic setup with me, so I'll probably post a different one as the initiation of the series. As I've done a few more interviews, I'm realizing that "math content creation" should be only a loose theme at best, ceding ground to whatever happens to be most interesting about a particular guest when necessary.

I'll keep you posted as more interviews get edited, and as we start posting them to some kind of regular feed.

New videos

Between the projects above, and the fact that I have been unusually slow to publish new videos lately, one could reasonably infer that I've been a bit distracted from the main goal of 3blue1brown. While that's obviously somewhat true, the bulk of the work represented by those projects has been outsourced (thanks to you), and my intent is very much for most of my own time to be focused on finding the topics worth explaining, and putting together good narratives and visuals for them.

If I'm being brutally honest, the delay in publishing new videos has as much to do with a kind of writers block as it does with any side projects.

After the matrix exponential videos, I had the intent of making a follow-on chapter talking about how that topic relates to studying the stability of dynamic systems. That script evolved a bit from its initial vision, but the general form it took on is one I remain quite excited about. The aim is for it to be a lesson that motivates why we care about eigenvectors and jacobians, but in a way which is (hopefully) appealing and approachable to anyone who has never heard of those topics. It also contains a bit of a meta-narrative questioning how we often structure math courses; as you know I can't resist waxing philosophical at the end of a video.

Nevertheless, after a lot of writing, I just wasn't getting to a point where I was comfortable locking it in to start animating it. Maybe it's because I know this has the potential to be a really good one, so I don't want to overwork it, but I ended up shelfing it to instead focus on a different topic from the list, namely to explain the unsolvability of the quintic. I'll spare you the details until there are more visuals to show with it, but boy will that one be fun.

For now I'll just say that both of these will end up being fairly large undertakings, and done right they should be ones that you and I will be able to look back on and feel proud of.

Until then,

-Grant