3Blue1Brown
• 9 months ago
I realized from comments that not everyone knew why I've been posting so many guest videos recently, which is fair if you didn't happen to watch the very end of the first one. In short, I was away on leave this summer, and during that time, I directed Patreon funds towards commissioning pieces from other creators I like, both to fill the airtime while I was away and to help share their work with this audience. There was even one comment from someone speculating that the channel had been purchased and was trying to diversify the hosts. I'm guessing this is because of a certain recent popular video describing the recent influx of private equity in the world of YouTube. To be clear, I don't even sell in-video sponsorships, so you can be sure I have no interest in selling any part of the channel. The process with the guest videos has actually been very fun. I took some time to provide editorial oversight as the scripts were written and as the drafts were edited, leading to many fruitful conversations about educational creation styles. It made me think that doing something like this again in the future could be fun. I probably wouldn't do a series of five in a row again, but perhaps just once or twice a year would bring on another creator to share. On the other hand, I see arguments going the other way. Featuring others with simple YouTube posts like this may give much of the same benefit to that creator. And when I watch other channels, I appreciate a certain consistency in knowing what to expect when I see a new one of their videos. Most of my favorite channels are intimately tied with the personality of their hosts. What do you think? --- Also, if you're curious, I've just come back to making videos now. I'm working on a trilogy related to differential equations that will (hopefully) start being published in early October.
84K votes
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84K votes
Yes, guest videos in future years would be fun too
Nah, just stick with 3blue1brown authored content
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3Blue1Brown
• 1 year ago
tl;dr: What would you most enjoy watching next? Many times, I’ve fallen prey to the sin of saying “in the next video, I’ll describe _____”, and then never actually making that next video. Or rather, I’ll start producing that next video, and decide for whatever reason that it wouldn’t actually be good. Past examples include describing how the Riemann Zeta function relates to primes, describing the Laplace transform, describing the beta distribution in probability, etc. The list, to my embarrassment, goes on. Most recently, in the quantum computing video, I referenced my intent to make a follow-on about the math of quantum mechanics that underlies what we described there. I’d aim to outline a concrete two-state system, and the mathematics used to describe it in quantum mechanics, and say a bit about entanglement between multiple such systems. While putting together an outline and notes for this, I find myself dreaming about doing a full series on quantum mechanics at some point. The math feels a little hollow until you put it into a bigger picture: Position/momentum operators, Schrödinger’s equation, harmonic oscillators, etc. Wallowing in these dreams, I’m wondering if it makes more sense to wait until I have a full plan for such a series and incorporate the lesson I planned to do next, namely, two-state systems + entanglement, into such a series. I wouldn’t make such a series immediately, because I know it would be a huge project, and one of my goals this year is to extend the linear algebra series by this fall, covering the singular value decomposition and the many subtopics it helps elucidate. A bit further down the road, though, it's a topic I'd love to visualize and to present more as a course than as a stand-alone video. I’m debating right now between reining in those dreams (for now) and doing that follow-on as promised, or instead turning to the older list and paying off the debt of a different promise from the past. Or instead, I could continue postponing all promises and jump straight into my linear algebra plans. What do you think? What would you like to watch next?
134K votes
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134K votes
The quantum mechanics underlying quantum computing
How the Riemann zeta function encodes the "chords" of primes
Intuition for the Laplace transform
Extension to the linear algebra series (emphasis on SVD)
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3Blue1Brown
• 1 year ago
Pop quiz time! Try to answer without looking it up. Suppose I have a mystery function, and I tell you that there’s some secret value among all the numbers from 1 to N, where if you plug that value into my function, it returns True, otherwise, it returns false. For example, maybe it simply looks something like "f(n): return (n == 123)". But you can't see the inside of the function; it's a black box. How long does it take to find this secret value? For a classical computer, there's no better method than to guess and check all N possibilities. Sometimes you're lucky and get it early; sometimes you're unlucky, and it takes closer to N; on average, it's N / 2. In CS, we call that an O(N) run time, disregarding the constant because we just care about how things scale as N grows. Here's your quiz: How long would it take a quantum computer to do the same task?
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183K votes
O(√N)
O(log(N))
O(log(log(N)))
O(1)
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3Blue1Brown
• 1 year ago
I've been spending most of this week writing/rewriting the script for Grover's algorithm video, which aims to highlight a connection between quantum computing and block collisions. Man, I thought this would be relatively simple, but it turns out to be very hard to explain quantum computing if you don't want to assume any background (shocking, I know!). It's one of those topics where once you know all the setup and premises, the result itself is swift and satisfying, but all the effort goes into wrapping your mind around the premises! It's a fun challenge, but the turnaround time may be a bit longer than what I initially anticipated.
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3Blue1Brown
• 1 year ago
Oh hey, it looks like the channel passed Tau Million subscribers! This is cause for some kind of celebration. What do you think about a simple behind-the-scenes style video on how I animate, both showing what manim is and how I use it? If so, do you have any requests for a mathematically interesting thing to animate as a demonstration? Preferably something where the code can be short, but the final result has something interesting to look at. For instance, something like the illustrations of Lissajous curves would be perfect (see the animation and code below). Also, the next installment on Transformers is coming soon, there were a few other things going on in my life in the last month that pulled me away from it.
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3Blue1Brown
• 2 years ago
Shorts barrage update: Thanks again for your understanding while I've been moving the pile of shorts adapted from old lessons onto this channel. There's still a large pile more, and what I currently have scheduled is to keep posting some daily between now and the end of the week, then after that, have them go out only weekly every Saturday. I don't like how posting them necessarily spams existing subscribers' notifications with snippets of old content they may have already seen, so I'm open to suggestions here. The goal is just to get them to exist in the short feed, spaced out enough to give the recommendation algorithm a chance to learn which ones people like. For any of you who are curious, I was just looking at the analytics for this last week, and here are some conclusions - Even early on, it's pretty clear that shorts are an effective way to introduce new audience members to old lessons, as measured by watch time from non-subscribers on (non-short) videos. - People who land on a long-form video by clicking on the "related video" thing at the bottom of a short tend to spend more time on that video than those coming from other traffic sources (like suggested videos). I'm not sure what I'd expect here, but it's nice to see that people discovering lessons in this way evidently come in more invested. - If you compare the age breakdown on shorts vs. long-form, contrary to what I was expecting, the age range where you see disproportionately more people on shorts is 25-34. The percentage of viewers in the more youthful range between 18 and 24 is about the same for both formats. I'll be curious to see if those hold up, say, 6 months from now, when activity on shorts is more purely about discovery in the shorts feed, with less contamination from subscribers landing on them through the current barrage. --- In the meantime, I'm keeping busy animating the next new lesson. It'll be another physics one (though not optics), which is probably still at least two weeks out. Stany tuned!
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Collaborations

What was Euclid really doing? | Guest video by Ben Syversen

3Blue1Brown and Ben Syversen
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Simulating and understanding phase change | Guest video by Vilas Winstein

3Blue1Brown and Spectral Collective
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The AI that solved IMO Geometry Problems | Guest video by @Aleph 0

3Blue1Brown and Aleph 0
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But how do AI images and videos actually work? | Guest video by Welch Labs

3Blue1Brown and Welch Labs
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Some light quantum mechanics (with minutephysics)

3Blue1Brown and minutephysics
2.1M views8 years ago
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