3blue1brownBut WHO is Math?
Audience:
Tags: philosophy-of-mathematics
This video is a two and a half hour long playdate between you and me---we will eat cookies together and go for a walk. This video is also a multidisciplinary and “autotheoretic” approach towards responding to the following question: why should I care about mathematics, or for that matter, higher education in general?
In this video I respond to this question with a question of my own: but WHO is math to you? To ask this question is to want to shift your perspective of math from something that can benefit you in some way or other, to someone who could be your friend. I demonstrate this perspective shift in three chapters:
Chapter 1, ~33 minutes long (starting at 3:26), is an exposition of the famous proof that √2 is irrational, but it is entirely disguised as a puzzle about tiles. At the end of the chapter, I also talk about why this proof reminds me of the grief and joy of letting go of a very important relationship to me.
Chapter 2, ~22 minutes long (starting at 36:16), is a memoir about difficult decisions I made concerning school, a relationship, future plans, and a job. This is also where we get to go on a walk together.
Chapter 3 part 1, ~44 minutes long (starting at 58:15), is an analysis of how G.H. Hardy, Francis Su, and Simone Weil engage with the question of why we care about mathematics, and in what ways asking “who is math?” builds upon their considerations on this topic.
Chapter 3 part 2, ~38 minutes long (starting at 1:42:25), is a collection of tentative proposals for what we can do in family upbringing, education, and academia contexts to support a vision of mathematics for human flourishing and mathematics as a friend.
Because the full video is far too long, I ask that you choose one of these four sections to judge.
Thank you for your time, and if you wish to reach out to me for any reason, please do not hesitate!
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Comments
Well - every one of my feedback thus far has been around 5.5, none above 6. Here I’m giving a 9. Thanks so much for sharing a fresh perspective of math, relationship, and things that matter to math and life that we often don’t think of. I listened to the entire video. Thank you!
The start feels more like a podcast than a video to me. The video as a whole is a bit long and maybe not suitable for the format (math exposition videos). It can be repetitive and rambly. Maybe you should have stuck with the script and tried to be more concise? But due to the length and general style, I don’t think it’s a good fit for this competition.
Maybe it would have been better to open with the puzzle and focus only on that. You don’t have to put everything into one video. I can tell this is important to you, but just because it’s important to you doesn’t mean that “being authentic” or “having a conversation” is a good way to organize the video. On Youtube, people want to know, “What’s the point?” or “Where are you going with this?” And that holds for educational content in general; students will space out if they don’t know where you’re going or how it fits in with other stuff they’re learning. I just find the pacing a bit too slow, and the explanations themselves could be more concise.
Many lovely appraches to explanations throughout the video, even though they could be polished. And fantastic execution overall. But obviously too long and too philosophical to be “useful” as an explainer. Even each individual section could be made snappier and more succinct by editing it down a bit. And as a personal preference: Since you put so much effort into everything else, you could have editied your screen recordings to mask out the Krita and Desmos UI to give the video a more coherent look.