3Blue1Brown makes really clear videos about maths

3Blue1Brown is Grant Sanderson, who’s writing software to help make videos explaining maths. So far, it’s going pretty well!

I’d been passingly aware of his first few videos, but the most recent one, about the classic puzzle, “if you put $n$ points on a circle and connect them all with lines, how many regions does it cut the circle into?” is really rather good. Here it is:

There’s a tendency in these “I’ll explain this complicated maths topic easily” videos to start off really well, but lose the plot as things get more complicated. That doesn’t happen in this video – Grant keeps the maths chugging along, building up a few helpful concepts and facts (go on, let’s call them lemmas), and finally putting it all together at the end, patiently and carefully.

The idea of building tools to more easily make visualisations of mathematical concepts immediately reminded me of Steven Wittens’ MathBox posts, which seem to have fizzled out. I’m sure 3Blue1Brown will eventually as well, but for now it looks like Grant’s got some really good ideas about how to make maths videos.