I’ve stuck my toes in with my Barefoot Math videos, but I haven’t found the time to make many of them. Jim Propp On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 11:14 AM Scott Kim <scottekim1@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks everyone for your thoughts. My conclusion is that the best work on explaining math to nonmathematicians is happening not in books and papers, but in short videos on YouTube.
Not only do sound and animation greatly improve the accessibility of the presentation, being on YouTube means these little gems can be found by mere mortals, instead of being buried away in academic journals. And there is something about the evolving conventions of YouTube videos that encourages personal, emotionally honest writing that is easy to relate to.
The Math YouTubers well known in this community include Numberphile and Vi Hart. I'm finding there are other gems:
*3blue1brown* has a huge library of lucid videos that edge into higher math. The following video analyzes an elegant International Math Olympiad problem that requires no higher math at all, but is nonetheless difficult, and serves as an excellent example of how research mathematicians think — the moral is that to simplify a complex problem, search for an invariant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M64HUIJFTZM&t=95s
*The Domain of Science* has produced an outstanding series of videos that give 10-15 minute overviews of the history of entire fields of science, and yes one of mathematics...also available as a poster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y
And what's really remarkable about these two videos is that they have 2 and 5 million views, respectively. The hunger is out there!
For the last year I've been shooting, editing and animating weekly videos for my own Game Thinking business ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jS5pCo5v8MoF6GjpGiXBw?view_as=subscriber ). I'm looking forward to making short math videos in the future.
Any of you interested in getting into making short math videos? It'd be fun to compare notes.
— Scott
On Sun, Aug 11, 2019 at 9:07 AM Scott Kim <scottekim1@gmail.com> wrote:
Does anyone know of a clear explanation written for nonmathematicians of the fundamental types of things research mathematicians do, and why?
I'm planning to write about how the process of inventing puzzles is similar to the process fo doing mathematical research, and how we can teach kids about mathematical research by having them invent puzzles. I'd like to reference other authors, and wonder what has been written that isn't just mathematicians talking to mathematicians.
The authors I know who have attempted this are Keith Devlin in Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, written to tell math grad students how "real" mathematics differs from how math is conventionally taught in K-12, and Eugenia Cheng in many of her books, starting with How to Bake Pi. These are good, but there's room for more voices.
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