Summer of Math Exposition

This video took over 10 minutes of setup trying to explain what a deformation mapping is that was extremely redundant saying the same thing twice two times with repetition repteatedly. The lecturer did a lot manim programming and wanted to say “look how much manim I did!” The interesting part of the video comes to the explainer of the determinant which is setup around that 10 minute mark, but even that takes a very long time to get going by going through the gradient and doesn’t actually start explaining determinant stuff until the 20 minute mark of a 27 minute video. Having some sign-posts in the lesson will let the student stop asking themselves “where is this going?” and get to the point already.

Something that kept bugging me is that the video contains a bit of code that is meant to be an amusing reminder asking to leave questions when there are comments but it is written poorly: if Question == True: Write(Comment)

Nobody uses capital letters for variable or function names and you also do not need to compare to True. Simply use: if question: write(comment)

I like the link between determinant and volume. But i think the pace is too slow, doing only determinant in a half hr video

The term continuum mozzarella keeps haunting me so this video definitely scored well in the memorable aspect. Also beautiful visualization.

Nothing confusing but wish this could’ve been explained a bit easier

The pacing of this video is nearly perfect. Everything from the notation to the mappings are incredibly well presented with examples that follow. The repetitive visuals got a bit stale after a while, but that is one of the few things I can fault about this video. Great video and a good introduction to deformation mechanics

Wow! This video is really excellent. The topic is challenging, and the creator was able to get across some very complex ideas in a way that I believe the target audience would really benefit from. The visuals are very well done, and extremely helpful in understanding the content. The only thing I find disappointing about this video is that it decreasing my chances of placing in the top 5, because as much as I think my video is excellent, I believe this one is even better. (That’s a joke, by the way.). Bravo to the creator; you should be very proud of this submission!

I want to give a short postscript to the creator of this video. If, as has been the case with me, you are getting a lot of really high scores, but also getting some (surprisingly) low scores, please disregard the low scores. There is truly no reason why anyone should give this video a score below 5. I don’t understand why anyone would do this, but you should not waste any time worrying about such scores.

Very good explanations and visuals!

One comment: the places where the determinant is negative are not exactly the places where the object goes through itself while being deformed but more the places where the local orientation of the object is flipped. (If the object “passes through itself” an even number of times, or if it passes through itself “in two dimensions at the same time”, then the determinant is positive again.)

I like this video, and think the audio quality and editting quality are generally quite good. However, I have some misgivings about the structure and content of the script that I think hold it back a bit:

1. A good portion of this video seems to be about justifying the importance of linear algebra; but as stated, deformation and transformations appears to be one of the most straightforward and applied applications of linear algebra. Basically, the audience of this video seems a bit unclear; if you don’t understand linear algebra, this video feels like it would fly over your head, but if you do understand linear algebra it seems as if it’s too straightforward.

2. Despite aiming for intuition, many of the real “applications” of deformations are not covered in this video. Showing how shear transformations, for example, would be relevant to engineering students but doesn’t seem to be touched on in depth. Meanwhile, affine transformations could be fascinating to computer science students, but that’s here lacking as well. Basically, this video seems to miss a lot by focusing too much on the theory, when the math is incredibly relevant to real applications.

Bottom line, I like the quality of this video, but I think the script could be tightened, reorganised, or readjusted to make for a much better final product.

Even though the time parameter was not essential, being able to smoothly move back and forth made for some good intuition about input and output points as reference and transformed.

I think it would have been nice to say the word “Jacobian,” since that’s exactly what you describe as the deformation gradient.

I do think this video is basically standard material in a decent multivariable calculus class, but not every multivariable calculus class is decent, so it never hurts to offer an extra explanation like this, especially when you have such friendly and inviting tone and easy-to-digest animations.

Linear algebra is just really hard in general, so it shouldnt count as a downside to the presentation. The motivation was finely explained, pretty clear in its explanations but hey,, linear algebra explained well is still confusing. fairly nnovel, unfortunately not very memorable as it couldve been. Its good.

Though fluent in english, his accent and his strange wordings sometimes makes this challenging subject just that more harder to describe to his audience. Shrug.