Here’s a fun thing I found: the Journal of Number Theory has a YouTube channel on which it publishes video abstracts of its papers. To my surprise, they’ve been doing it since 2008!
By and large they’re exactly as awkward as you’d expect a mathematician mumbling into their laptop about the paper they just wrote to be, but there are some good ones. This paper about generalising Zeckendorf’s theorem by Steven J. Miller et al lept out at me, and the video is quite pleasant, like a very quick seminar by a visiting speaker.
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnYJwvOfzLo]
K.P.S. Bhaskara also does a good job of selling his paper “On Zumkeller papers” in his video abstract:
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z85qyvIorBE]
I’ve enjoyed watching these videos and they’ve prompted me to look at some interesting papers but, as the author of a paper, would being asked to record a video abstract be a nice challenge or would it fill you with terror?
I haven’t found any other maths journals which do video abstracts. I suppose that once the Dance your PhD people become tenured academics, there’s no guessing what the future holds for scholarly advertisement.
Meanwhile, in Russia, this trailer for a homotopy theory lecture on Russian education site Lektorium is immanentising the eschaton:
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqAf5lOJZew]
More information
Journal of Number Theory video abstracts
Via James Grime, who found a really exceptionally awkward video abstract that I won’t post here.
That Russian video is pure gold. Sometimes, just sometimes, I get a hint of a feeling when I’m thinking about some really interesting mathematics and the creative juices are flowing, that there should be some epic soundtrack as the proof unfolds and gets more exciting as it goes on. But that’s probably just me.