Summer of Math Exposition

there are a couple of things i quite liked about this: the style (font, intro, colors, although simplistic) is quite nice and pleasant to look at. Also it kinda makes your shitty mic not be too apparent and sort of fitting (no offense of course but the audio really isnt good). The graphics/visualizations are great.

(Now overall the video is relatively good but im going to focus more on things you can improve since i think that would have more value to you)

The way you explained things is nice but im a bit confused about your target audience, at times its way too slow and i feel like especially the beginning sections are too slow and boring, was very hard to keep my focus during that. Overall an interesting topic but i think the audience for such a topic would be more restricted to someone already quite inclined to math/math competitions, so keep that in mind.

I wish you also had more visualizations, especially at the beginning instead of just walls of text and notation on the screen, would help get your point across more easily, clearly and quickly. (Also your style would lend itself very well to that).

Also the complete lack of any sound effects or at least background music/ambience makes the whole thing feel less like a music video and more just like a dry lecture. This is probably the number one thing that made the whole thing feel quite more boring that it should have been.

This was a great video! I was able to follow most of it, and you spent enough time going over the concepts to make sure they would stick in my mind. I lost a couple threads near the end, but I’m sure I could figure them out if I spent a bit more time on it. I was originally going to give it a 7, but your mistake near the end bumped it up to an 8. I love it when math explainers pull that kind of thing :)

Seems like a suitable introduction to modular arithmetic. I guessed that repeated squaring might be involved, but it wasn’t.

I’m sure if you had more time you would have leaned into the visual style more. You could have made more use of the clock analogy, for example, particularly when showing the residue cycles. And maybe groups of little squares (black for positive, red for negative) would be more parseable than long division.

The guess-and-check at the end feels inelegant. If that’s what the AIME writers intended, that’s a bummer.

This was fantastic! I have a few students taking number theory, and have already sent this video to them :)

The art style was fun and engaging, your explanations were ordered and well-paced (maybe a touch too fast sometimes), and I really like how you show the dead-ends of solutions instead of just the polished final product. I even forgive you for not doing the necklace proof, even though it’s one of my favourites.

This video would be a really great introduction to anyone trying to get into number theory. All the concepts introduced were clearly explained, and the build up to the ultimate aime question. No criticism.

The broadening of a specific problem to general ideas

I would have liked if you came back to the AIME problem earlier. Maybe explaining how each new concept introduced can help move the solution forward a bit, or something similar.

Ideas are good. Graphics can be better.

I found the video quite difficult to follow, probably it was not necessary to add a proof of Fermat’s little theorem. Also, it’s not clear how one is supposed to check that 17 is not a solution, and 97 is, without an electronic device.The retro graphics is difficult to read, too.

The video introduces several ideas from number theory and then applies them to the target problem. Each rule is outlined really well. I also enjoyed the visual style of the video. At first it appeared quite pixelated to me, but it works for the entire video.

That’s a crazy hard problem! It was well explained and very fast, which I like, because it is easy to pause and think a bit. I didn’t like the bitmap graphics, but I guess that works ok on mobile devices. I think this was the first video where I turned full screen off. The sound was also muffled, so I marked it down a bit for production value.