Summer of Math Exposition

The ending is the best move: what the first minute sets up, the last minute uses. In between, two millennia, Euclid to Newton to the sphere, each piece told well; what is missing is the one thread that needs every piece. Name the thread, and ten minutes become one film.

The 3D artstyle that introduces the video is really engaging and cozy, and it’s a shame it stops appearing halfway through the video.

The topic of the video is never clear and it doesn’t feel like there is a coherent structure being followed. The editing is sometimes really lacking and the inconsistency between the whiteboard used for the first proofs and the paper sheets for the later ones feels random. Music could be nice.

The visual style is pretty charming imo, and the storytelling is not bad at all for newcomers to math.

I was enjoying the historical animations and the stories of the pythagoreans. I lost interest when you got into the math because of the low quality of the graphical presentation. Why would you have all these cool animations of characters and make the math look like chicken scratch?

Not sure what I’m hearing around the 1:10 mark? Anyhow. Good to know that Heinz meanz Pythagoraz.

I enjoyed this. You have a very pleasant narrating voice, the storyline was a bit all over the place, but in a fun way. Two thing I thought could be better:

1. The pacing was a bit uneven: while most of it seems to me to be accessible to a general middle school audience, some parts sped up the reasoning considerably (particularly the irrational root proof), and would seem to me to be accessible only to math-savvy high school students (please take this with a grain of salt though, I have no kids and am not a teacher).
2. The voice-over editing could be better in places. Especially where you splice together to sentences from different takes, they are sometimes a bit too close together, missing the ‘breathing space’ between sentences which makes it sound a bit unnatural.

It didn’t feel like there was a “main” topic as the video was kind of scattered around through different topics. I was watching something about Pythagoreas being a cult leader, then something about newton, then a proof for why the diagonal of a unit square is irrational, but at the very least there was some closure from the beginning tale of Pythagoras at the end, though the ending was kind of abrupt and not motivated. There also wasn’t really proper transitions between topics, and there weren’t really any pauses, especially in the speech, to let the watcher breathe. The scatterbrained nature of the video may have been more forgivable otherwise. For the good, parts of the video were pretty funny in my opinion, like the Nelson Newton and parts of the end scene. Some of the visuals were also aesthetically interesting, like the 3D models, and the initial tale of Pythagoreas being kind of a cult leader was interesting.

Weird and scattered without a cohesive point

Very interesting video, thank you for putting it together. I thought it was well scripted, edited, and animated overall.

Clearly, the video itself was non-Euclidean, being that it bounced around between Pythagoras, Newton, Gauss, etc, before returning back to the guiding north pole of Pythagoras himself. I have to drop a few points because of how the marking criteria are set out, but the video was certainly memorable.

It was certainly entertaining and an exposition of math, but perhaps only for existing mathematicians.

I felt that most of the equations would have benefited from being in LaTeX, rather than handwritten, given that you already spent time on preparing and animating it beforehand.

Great overview of all of Pythagoras’ nonsense!