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Lessons by 3blue1brown

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Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#111

Post by GuB-42 »

dingosity wrote: post #7

2b1b does a video on how you raise e to a matrix (hint: raising something to e is converted into another function where it's not nonsensical to do such a thing.) In about 10 minutes he explains something my math methods instructor struggled with over two weeks (4 classes). I was resistant to the view that YouTube could host "decent" instructional content for a long time. That video was one of the first that was CLEAR…

What 2b1b, as well as other science YouTubers do is that they give you insight that more conventional teaching may lack. What YouTubers don't offer however is training, as in, the sometimes boring part where you do exercises.

They are complementary, an entertaining YouTube video may first give you motivation to get into a seemingly boring subject. It may also help you after you took your classes, to help make elements fall into place, but it only works if you have learned the elements beforehand.

As educative these videos are, they are entertainment, and they are driven by the rules of entertainment, they wouldn't get much views otherwise. So it leans heavily on accessible and clever explanations, surprising results and relatively short form, the boring stuff is often left out, and unfortunately, some of it is necessary to progress. Most science YouTubers admit it, and urge everyone to take school seriously.

I have never learned a field just from YouTube videos. It either left me with superficial knowledge (which is better than nothing) or acted as a way to consolidate knowledge I already had.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#112

Post by ChuckMcM »

webshit2 wrote: post #104
ChuckMcM wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that we both saw the same thing. I visited MIT as it was on my list of schools I wanted to attend out of HS and realized after that visit that all the "action" there was in research/postgrad so it was a better graduate school candidate than undergrad.

The undergrads are more involved with research than at most other schools (huge range in quality/difficulty/etc, but the option is there). The teaching quality doesn't really suffer from the focus on research. Blackboard style classes probably aren't much better than any other school, but lab classes were quite good.

To be clear, I'm not being critical here, it was an impression from my visit. Lots of people I know (like gumby) and others have gone to MIT as undergraduates and really felt it was worthwhile. I really wanted to go to Caltech but only landed on the wait list and settled for USC (who offered better financial aid so there was that)

My kids all ended up at various small private colleges depending on what they found as a fit for their interests and I got to see through them the difference between going to a school with 20,000 students (USC) vs one with 1,500 students (Reed). In hindsight I suspect I would have done better at a more intimate school (harder to have one's slacking off ignored by the administration right?)

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#113

Post by webshit2 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #112
webshit2 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The undergrads are more involved with research than at most other schools (huge range in quality/difficulty/etc, but the option is there). The teaching quality doesn't really suffer from the focus on research. Blackboard style classes probably aren't much better than any other school, but lab classes were quite good.

To be clear, I'm not being critical here, it was an impression from my visit. Lots of people I know (like gumby) and others have gone to MIT as undergraduates and really felt it was worthwhile. I really wanted to go to Caltech but only landed on the wait list and settled for USC (who offered better financial aid so there was that) My kids all ended up at various small private colleges depending on what they found as…

No worries, that's definitely a reasonable impression since there are way more postgrads than undergrads. I just wanted to point out that undergrads are allowed to participate in the 'action'. But of course there is the occasional bad class (Peter Shor is not that good at teaching Shor's algorithm).

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#114

Post by liorben-david »

udev wrote: post #78
liorben-david wrote: post #54

Let me preface what I'm saying by just expressing gratitude to 3b1b for making an amazing math animation library, getting tons of people excited about math(Including me), and producing some really great videos to give people intuition. All that being said, I've found that 3b1b videos tend to bound the intiution you can get on a topic. Most of his videos tend to reframe an idea in some sort of interesting way that can…

This reminds of Richard Feyman's observation how some people count visually while others do it by sound. You might be one of those people that can do math purely symbolically, by parsing and manipulating expressions, a bit like regular language and you don't need your brain to build a mental image for the things you work with. I am intuition-first kind of person, and let me tell you, intuition is not a crutch, it can…

I think that's a good way to look at it. I'm definitely on the symbolic side of things for my understanding. I study pure math and the 1 applied math course I had to take(Applied Complex Analysis) was a nightmare because I was doing math without a formal framework.

I will say though that not every topic can have a sensible visual model to it, and being able to acquire symbolic intuition is probably essentiall to go far in any field.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#115

Post by liorben-david »

xpe wrote: post #63
liorben-david wrote: post #54

Let me preface what I'm saying by just expressing gratitude to 3b1b for making an amazing math animation library, getting tons of people excited about math(Including me), and producing some really great videos to give people intuition. All that being said, I've found that 3b1b videos tend to bound the intiution you can get on a topic. Most of his videos tend to reframe an idea in some sort of interesting way that can…

> Your understanding of the topic is often completely limited to the way he frames it, and becomes quite useless when you leave that limited framing. Completely limited? My framing of human learning goes roughly like this: 1. When we are motivated to solve a particular problem, we can draw upon a multitude of “frames” (one example being metaphor, another being an equation, another being a visualization) to help us. 2…

I think I agree with that. To 3b1b credit I think he frames his videos as "Here's a cool way to think about this topic".

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#116

Post by spallas »

haberman wrote: post #38

I would love it if some of these educational YouTube videos came with exercises. I watch a lot of educational YouTube videos. But I've come to see them as more entertainment than education. Not in terms of the quality of the videos (which is often excellent), but in terms of what I retain. Sometimes I come across YouTube videos that YouTube claims I have watched, and I don't remember the first thing about them. I thi…

Going into that direction, I really appreciated the lessons that come with a written version, most of them have some recap quizzes that I find helpful

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#117

Post by pdpi »

hpcjoe wrote: post #103
pdpi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "ten minutes to understand something I never quite got" moment was his video on Fourier Transforms.

There's an old joke in math/physics student circles that covers this. Student goes to see the prof in their office hours to try to understand something the prof said is seen to be trivial. They spend 4 hours working on it, and the student returns to their friends in class. They ask how it went. The student says "yeah, it was trivial." For those who don't quite get the joke, 4 hours to show something is trivial, tends…

To be fair there is a grain of truth to the joke. E.g. Cayley’s theorem is sort of like that — once you get it, it feels like it barely qualifies as a theorem, it’s just a natural consequence of the definitions involved.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#118

Post by lahvak »

geokon wrote: post #88
pdpi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "ten minutes to understand something I never quite got" moment was his video on Fourier Transforms.

This probably won't be a very popular take.. but to me Fourier Transforms are the perfect example of the opposite problem - where the educators are so hellbound on constructing a visual explanation that they end up brain damaging the students. I've seen this come up several times in my math education. For the Fourier transform there are primarily two issue: 1. The "complex plane" - this tries to make complex numbers…

Ad 1.: Multiplication of complex numbers is a very intuitive operation on complex plane, the moment you realize you need to use polar coordinates.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#119

Post by analognoise »

jonahx wrote: post #31
dingosity wrote: post #7

2b1b does a video on how you raise e to a matrix (hint: raising something to e is converted into another function where it's not nonsensical to do such a thing.) In about 10 minutes he explains something my math methods instructor struggled with over two weeks (4 classes). I was resistant to the view that YouTube could host "decent" instructional content for a long time. That video was one of the first that was CLEAR…

I've had math instruction at the undergraduate and graduate level at top universities, with good instructors that I liked, and I can say without question YouTube is superior. There are many channels with outstanding content. This video is not an outlier.

Could you share a list of favorites you've collected?

I wish there was a big list that had links to the best lectures and the accompanying book for so many things.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#120

Post by jhanschoo »

analognoise wrote: post #119
jonahx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had math instruction at the undergraduate and graduate level at top universities, with good instructors that I liked, and I can say without question YouTube is superior. There are many channels with outstanding content. This video is not an outlier.

Could you share a list of favorites you've collected? I wish there was a big list that had links to the best lectures and the accompanying book for so many things.

Have a look at 3b1b summer of exposition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Qixy-r_rQ
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