3blue1brownIMO 2026 Problem 1 - Human-Friendly Explanation!
Audience:
The International Mathematics Olympiad has the reputation of being among the hardest mathematics competitions in the world (as well as the most prestigious).
But the first IMO problem each year is usually more accessible. The reason is not only to give all contestants an accessible entry point, but also to entice casual mathematics enthusiasts from the general public (that’s us!), allowing us to experience the joy of recreational maths and put our problem solving ability to the test!
Analytics
Comments
Video was so good that for a second I forgot I was supposed to review the video, paused, and started trying to solve it myself. Great idea for a video, great execution, I understood it fully. I feel like I’m being tutored. It absolutely is accessible. Amazing!
1-9 Motivation: 1 (dont find any of this useful) Clarity: 8 (didnt state why you want to know this rather than IMO) Novelty: 1 (not new, already proofed) Memorability: 1 11/4 = 2.75
Quality & explanations were top notch! plus 1 to score 3.75
Stopping to define GCD and LCM rather than waiting until after the problem description was given made the problem description somewhat hard to track. Consider collating material even if that requires introducing terms out of order. Speech was very clear, varied/expressive in tone, and well-enunciated, without distracting fillers. Introducing (color-by-factor-partitioned) graphs as a means of visualizing the structure of the solution space was a very intuitive and helpful approach.
He explained the problem and solution very well and he used very good animations. I like the graph there. Otherwise there is not much to fix.
Nicely explained.
This was an interesting problem to analyze, but I’m not really sure what I’ve learned. I think this video lacks in motivation; that is, why are we analyzing this problem. Is it simply because it’s interesting? Okay, that’s not a terrible thing, but unless there is something really powerful that helps me look at things in a different way, then it’s simply an interesting problem being solved. I guess that’s the big weakness in this video from my perspective, this is just a close look at an interesting problem, but there’s nothing super interesting going on; there’s no “oh wow” moment.
The style is clear. Audio quality is good, your narration is clean and natural sounding, visuals are good - if nothing too fancy.
Motivation: yes, it is an interesting problem. But I don’t feel any motivation beyond the math challenge. Clarity: P-adic notation introduction felt a bit abrupt, but otherwise clear. Novelty: I think this video is lacking in this regard a little bit. I don’t know if this exact problem has been covered before, if no one else covered it, then sure, it is novel. But similar videos are abundant, explaining tricky IMO challenges. Memorability: The challenge itself is interesting, it was surprising to learn the 2 challenge statements about this game, and then seeing the proof. However, I’m not sure if this was motivating enough to learn more about P-adics, and there is not much else to take away from this.
Overall, still better than average :)
Just a straight run through of the solution to a problem.
The video layout is effective enough to show every information at once and the facecam helps following along the voice. The proof is explained in a concise and accessible way.
But the lack of music, the audio noise in the background of the microphone, and the sometimes too dense layout (with lots of text) make the video not as pleasant as the math it presents. Especially near the end where we are only given plain text and a voice-over.
For me it was kinda of slow. But it definitely needs some processing on the audio since there is an background static.