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Lessons by 3blue1brown

3blue1brown.com

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Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#61

Post by beambot »

jameshart wrote: post #51
eimrine wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just listen to some music with spectrum visualization, this is a Fourier transform of what you are listening right now.

That doesn’t provide the full understanding you might think it does. For example: define ‘right now’. Instantaneously, music is a single sound pressure measurement. That doesn’t have a Fourier transform. It doesn’t have a frequency. It’s just a single sample. Fourier transforms work on functions. Typically functions in the time domain. And typically (but not always) on that function within a bounded range of time. An…

I think I get what you are trying to say... but the intuition about "this moment in time" is perfectly reasonable for a spectrum analyzer, since it's actually doing a DFT (not continuous from +-infinity) with the last sample (i.e. "now") defining the end of the window.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#62

Post by eru »

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…

Michael Penn's math lectures on YouTube typically come with exercises.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#63

Post by xpe »

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. People sometimes cannot shift frames of reference effectively (i.e. perhaps fixating on only an few approaches). This is not the fault of the particular frame(s); this is a limitation in how people use them.

3. To our brains, almost everything is a “model” … a way of conceptualizing, deciding what to pay attention, what to ignore, what questions to ask, and when to recognize we aren’t getting anywhere.

4. Some models / metaphors are better than others for certain people and contexts.

- Some are better connected to other models, allowing more fluid thinking.

- Some are more rigorous.

- Some are simpler.

It depends on so many things.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#64

Post by jameshart »

veltas wrote: post #55
jackling wrote: post #2

I'm likely in the minority, but I found 3blue1brown videos difficult to understand and they usually give me a worse intuition about a concept than I previously had. I wonder why that is. Seems like most people I know swear by his videos.

No shame in that, I love his videos but I think it's well established that there are different kinds of learners out there. His content matches what works for me, and it's worth reminding people like me that one size doesn't fit all. But for those he does speak to, he is a fantastic teacher worthy of the praise he gets.

Careful - if by ‘different styles of learners’ you mean the old Visual/auditory/reading/kinesthetic ‘learning styles’ model, that is largely debunked and discredited as far as I understand it (see eg https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty...).

I think it’s absolutely the case that some lessons work for some people at some times for some topics and don’t for others - but that’s not likely down to any innate ‘learning style’ that one person has over another. The same approach on a different topic on a different day might have the exact opposite effect in terms of who gets most out of the lesson.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#65

Post by phkahler »

adamc wrote: post #26

Love this series; have been watching for a few years now. I wish we put more resources into educational materials of this level (and with this kind of universal access) as a country.

>> I wish we put more resources into educational materials of this level (and with this kind of universal access) as a country.

I'm not sure that's possible. He is free to create videos on his own time, when he has a compelling idea how to present a topic. "put more resources" on a project sounds like funding with a specific agenda and plan - a committee-determined set of topics to cover and then push on creators with a timeline. You can certainly get good results doing that with the right approach and people, but I don't think it will turn out as good as this. For example, 3B1B gut used to work at Khan academy. Not saying Khan is bad, just that 3B1B is better if less prolific.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#66

Post by Thoreandan »

seanw444 wrote: post #52
RichieAHB wrote: post #17

I feel like the Manim[1] library Grant created to make these videos is becoming some sort of "video matplotlib". I've seen it used in so many maths videos up to this point. There seems like a good amount of value in creating a simple, structured and clear way to represent these concepts in videos. [1] https://www.manim.community/

I never knew he made a whole open source project for it, nor that it was even a library doing the animation. I thought he hand-animated his videos. Brilliant.

What made his videos catch my eye was the plotting of the vector text fonts, I love that effect. I'm pretty sure he used the Hershey fonts in early videos.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#67

Post by thethirdone »

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.

I don't think the limited understanding is useless once you leave the simplified framing. As an example, linear algebra is far more than just 2/3D continuous space that he covers in "Essence of Linear Algebra", but I think having the solid visual intuition for those simple cases gives you a foundation to learn the less visualizable versions of linear algebra.

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#68

Post by impendia »

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.

I am a math professor, and I try to do a good job teaching. Any topic that 3b1b covers, the video will give a better presentation than I would in a lecture hall!

It is part of our job to lecture, but that's not our only job as an instructor, and I wouldn't even say it's the most important one. Our job is to assemble a coherent course -- typically involving lectures, homeworks, exams, etc. where everything is tied together, and where I try to chart a coherent path through the material, so that the students have learned a subject by the end.

Once I was teaching vector calculus, a subject which 3b1b covers, and I showed a couple short clips in class. I also shared additional links with my students and encouraged them to watch. As instructor I try to make good use of any and all helpful resources which are available, and 3b1b is certainly one of them!

Re: Lessons by 3blue1brown

#69

Post by locusofself »

gumby wrote: post #24
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…

> CLEARLY superior to the instruction I received at a tier 1 research institution. It was pretty clear at the R1 institution I attended (MIT) that it is really a huge research lab with a small school attached, and that the educational part, for undergrads at least, was definitely not a priority. The continuing stream of advertising (err, alumni updates) that I’ve received over the subsequent decades don’t seem to con…

I've been watching some MIT lectures online recently, most of which are about 10 years old. Do they still use those huge a chalkboards?
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