Summer of Math Exposition

Presented by 3Blue1Brown 3blue1brown

What Comes Before the Past Perfect?

Audience:

I will be discussing how temporal grammar can be linked to lambda calculus, particularly focusing on de Bruijn indices and the significant implications of this equivalence.

Also, I will be exploring some aspects of linguistics and the etymology of the pluperfect tense, and how that logic can be extended to name the new temporal tenses, one being the ‘perpluperfect’ tense and explain the motivation behind it and why English as it currently stands is temporally ambiguous.

Analytics

6.49 Overall score*
43 Rank
12 Votes
9 Comments

Comments

6

Watch the plosives into the microphone, there’s a lot of breath noise :) I gotta say, I did not expect a #SummerOfLinguisticsExposition crossover…

6.3
  1. The production was amazing! The best I’ve seen so far, up there with the best I’ve reviewed in the past.
  2. Chapter titles were really funny
  3. Couldn’t a comma after “store” solved the precision issue? On a larger note, it appears to be an attempt at charactertizing a meta-language at a local scale (given the pluperfect operator and its added scopes)? Maybe the discussion could have included the quest of analytic philosophy in 20th century to do that and its failure, even Tarski where a metalanguage is proven impossible (or Lacan/Derrida, in the continental tradition)
  4. The connection between temporal grammar and lambda calculus appears “weak” i.e. obvious or redundant perhaps?
3

I’m sorry but I stopped watching this halfway through. It was actually quite interesting but I found the audio unbearable. I highly recommend you get a pop filter for your microphone (and/or a better microphone), or at the very least treat the audio in software to remove the pops. As it stands, every single P you pronounce is about as grating as as nails on a chalkboard. Please note: this is purely a technical issue, you have a very nice voice and narrating style!

7

That was nice! You obviously have to work on your sound setup/balance. But otherwise a very neat video.

7
  • A fun watch! The rapid bouncing across a breadth of topics reminded me of classic VSauce or that one CGPGrey video about runways. The visuals were also well-made and informative.
  • If I had one critique, aside from the audio quality, it would be that I wanted more explanation of the tense grammar and the lambda calculus. There was nothing confusing about the explanations, but given that a viewer might know nothing about either topic, some more linguistic or lambda-calculus examples might be helpful.
6.2

Interesting video on connecting language and math and it made me wonder how it would connect to other tenses, like the past continuous tense, where the action might still be ongoing. It also introduced me to lambda calculus, which I used for defining functions but never thought of the mathematical construct behind it.

The animations sometimes reminded me of death by powerpoint style presentations, for example, the origami bird flying away around 4:30.

4.9

OMG so many plosive sounds in this poor microphone

6.4

Strong points

  • I always like to see some linguistics and language stuff. Thinking about tenses is fun, and introducing that to people who have never actively thought about it is valuable.
  • I liked the bit where you go into the latin names :)

Medium points

  • The pivot to lambda calculues and De Bruijn indices seemed a bit sudden and I’m not entirely sold on doing this in the same video as the relative pasts grammar thing. Would it really be that problematic to have larger integers in your time markers?

Weak points

  • Prominent plosives on the voice recording – try to hold the microphone a bit further way from your mouth, or at an angle: blowing into the microphone makes the boomy sounds at the start of a lot of words.
8.3

Pretty unique video