Summer of Math Exposition

Rough around the edges, but I like that a video sometimes, especially in the math/science video genre on YouTube where things tend to want to be super polished.

The story of the magic square of squares is quite charming, but the editing style of this video makes it difficult to watch. I could live without the monochrome webcam as that adds very little to the video. At least you took the Matt Parker parker square theme of giving it a go, and that is extremely admirable. I would love to see your video-making style improve in the future

The presenter’s humility is nice. Also, more stories of failure and unsolved problems are always cool and good.

This was a fun exploration into what it’s like doing math. I would love to have moments in the videos where you showed any magic squares or values you got that were close, or any values from your brute force attempts. The animation being in desmos at the start is really funny to me!

In many places, the video felt more like s draft than a final summary, but that makes sense since it contributes to the problem without offering the definite answer. I liked how you laid out prior work and why you are interested in the topic, but I felt that with streamlining your story, the video could be condensed and thus made more clear.

Small thing: I think the sections where you plotted something in real time would have looked better if you had zoomed into the plots and trimmed the UI.

Hope you or someone else can pick this up and find the answers!

This is a nice story, but is it helpful for students? It’s a long video and the topic is quite advanced. It’s interesting for me (math teacher) but I think is annoying for students. Finally, I suggest simpler animation, both for you and viewers.

It’s always fun to see the process of math. The struggle, the pattern-finding, the clever insights, and even the small sign error that brings it all crashing down. It’s at least as good a representation of math as any clean, polished result.