Video bloggification and continuation of differential equations

1. I love physical books and would love to see you make one 2. Not immediately useful to me but very fun regardless. I'd actually prefer not to see usual 3Blue1Brown content in the classroom just because I think that putting things in a class setting somehow ruins it, like how being forced to read a book in class isn't the same as reading the same book on your own accord. I suppose that a more traditional textbook that incorporates your teaching philosophy would make more sense if you want to expand to the classroom, or something along the lines of what you did for the MIT course, where the content is specifically meant for the classroom setting. Also, I think that with the large international following you have, it would be great to see people translating such print or text versions to other languages. I think people might greatly benefit from non-video formats + translated articles. Luckily your channel seems to have no shortage of multi-lingual supporters who could help with that. 3. Yes! I'm pretty good with typography I think and would love to contribute to something like this. 4. Related to quizzes, interesting problems would be fun. Granted, coming up with good math problems is no easy task.

Written versions of your videos would be a huge help. I think that in some sense, technical content "feels" technical when presented in a written format (eg. Latex formatting looks so much cooler than any other). With reference to your animations, I think you could do something similar to Michael Nielsen's neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com. That way, your animations could be interactive and that'd be an added bonus!

One thought (that would add a layer of complexity, but which would be really neat) is to make text versions that are interactive. For example, I found it very satisfying to learn about Gaussian Processes from an excellent article on Distill [https://distill.pub/2019/visual-exploration-gaussian-processes/]. The interactions could default to what was shown in the video, but they would let the reader play with the system and facilitate a very different type of learning.

I use spaced repetition (Anki). The cards are made both while watching your videos (pausing and entering in a suitable card) and when I read textbooks online. It's easier to copy and paste text from a textbook to make cloze deletions, but apart from that there isn't much of a difference between videos and text for me. In fact, I think videos result in better cards sometimes, because once I pause, I am forced to conjure up the ideas and language myself to add to the card as opposed to seeing it written in front of me.

1. I would love written versions of the videos. I often don't have the patience to watch and listen, and feel I learn and internalize better through reading. 2. I think this would be helpful. 3. I would like to help with the converting to written form part, assuming I have the energy and time to spare 4. Maybe for things like the linear algebra series or calculus series, some standard textbook questions could be good? Or questions that delve deeper into the topic for the reader to ponder?

Xinke Guo-Xue

2. Not for me personally, no. 3. I would potentially be willing to, given that I'm not given too much. 4. Maybe some bonus open-ended questions for people to ponder?

C.J. Smith

1. Yes! A number of times I have remembered something from one of your videos and wanted to quickly go back and refer to it, but it is difficult to find exactly where it will be, and sometimes even which video it is. It'd be excellent to just be able to search for some key words or scan for it to find the info/visualization I want quickly.

C.J. Smith

1) definitely do text versions! There are many resources in text for all the subjects you approach but your work has that special touch of appealing to a learner’s sense of aesthetic and narrative. If you wanna go that route, do whatever makes your heart sing! but I see a text-version specifically geared toward elegant/aesthetic presentation to supplement the mathematical content. 2) i definitely think that would be cool! 3) I am not very highly skilled but I am enthusiastic and would be happy to assist in whatever meager ways i may be helpful ! 4) playable modules! Little mathematical toys built in Mathematica always helped me learn math much easier in school, finding a way to integrate your library with playable modules would be so much fun!

Jarrod Sage

1) Yes. Text versions permit rapid reading/skimming and they can be searched! Several others have commented that they like to read first, watch second. I'm the other way around--I learn best when I have a new topic presented "holistically" and then I can read the text to help "cement" the concepts. Either way, they are great complementary techniques to use together. 2) Yes, absolutely. An integrated text/video library (textbook) would be an excellent resource for the casual learner or for the professional instructor. 3) Unfortunately, I am unable to contribute any time or special expertise. :( 4) I'm looking forward to immersive video (VR). Your graphic descriptions of mathematical concepts are wonderful, even when reduced to 2D on a laptop. I'd love to see (literally) a re-render of quaternions in 3D!

David B. Hill

Print mode is VERY useful to me. Due to the nature of my job, where I'm offline quite a bit, I often carry "print to PDF" copies of articles on my laptop to study.

Darren Pierce

Hi Grant. I am more than willing and able to contribute to textifying or blogofying or whatever. I am retired (therefore, free in both senses), have a degree in physics and maths, am a trained secondary school teacher (an so can English good), have 40 years experience in IT and, in my final professional posting, was science editor for official publication for one of the UN programmes for 4 years. I think I can help.

I would love a text version, for the exact reasons you mentioned (easy ability to scan etc)

Although I really do enjoy your videos and would prefer them over any text, the written form (maybe as a pdf supplemented with the latex animate package) also seems a compelling way to complement the material. I'd be willing to lend a hand, maybe in transcribing videos or translating even.

I also thought that he was German for a long time (I think a lot of people here in Germany do), but actually he was from Austria... However he lived and worked in Germany for some time.

I agree, and that is where my own time is going. Luckily I think this is a much more outsourcable project than, say, scaling up video production.

3blue1brown

That's a really great point about how the optimal division of topics depends on the medium. There are definitely some videos I can see as being more natural as multiple mini-articles and others where several videos together would constitute a more coherent "chapter". The first step for us will be doing a one-to-one mapping, but after that, I think you're definitely right that it's worth putting more thought into the question of how to reorganize the topics make it a fully coherent book.

3blue1brown

Well, this is something that I'm trying to outsource as much as possible. I want my own efforts to go to new videos, but having someone (like James) help coordinate the efforts to translate it into a different medium is very helpful.

3blue1brown

I love the idea of framing them as "companions".

3blue1brown

Thanks for the feedback Yahya! Yes, I have a bad habit of not always following through immediately with planned (and announced ) future content, but it feels good to dig back into the differential equations.

3blue1brown

Oh, thanks, good to know!

3blue1brown

This resonates a lot with me and is one of the main reasons I'm doing it. There are so many good math videos on YouTube, but sometimes I find myself wanting to quickly reference, say, an idea Mathologer put out, and its surprisingly hard to find sometimes!

3blue1brown

As a Boomer I have been old school about printed documents, but slowly came to appreciate video documentation to the point that I prefer it now. Our company does almost all documentation and manuals as videos, with only minor supplementary PDFs. That said I do miss the ability to thumb through a document, and somehow have muscle memory help me find those sections I want to revisit. But the recent addition of Table of Contents and Chapters in videos has made it easier to search those sections. Perhaps what is missing is the analog of 'thumbing through' a video, or and Index. Printing out would be good, if we could make pictures like in Harry Potter, that are not static (like printing a GIF I guess). But I agree for archival purposes nothing beats paper, as you know the video formats will change by 2030. I would strive to break new ground in blending the video experience with our book reading habits. Take some analogs and blend it together where possible, or invent something new. The 3B1B graphics are so instructive, it would be hard to put into words or print IMHO and get the same impact.

The tight editing and polish of your videos is the draw for me. They keep me entertained and engaged. Another draw is the visualization of concepts and the way you describe and break down things to make them understandable. Demystifying set theory basics is a good example.

I could help if you should decide to jot down the notes in org-mode so you’d get different formats for almost-free. I have some experience with creating both latex-to-pdf-for-print and html-to-epub from the same source (and aggregating multiple blog-style articles into book-form).

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide

1. Love having written content. As you mentioned, very useful for skimming. Also I'm somewhat of a spatial learner so being able to attribute different information to different locations of the page is very helpful for my memory. 2. I'm still a bit unclear on what print mode is. If it's a giant poster that's supposed to explain the entire concept, I don't think that would be all that helpful except for maybe as a memory aid. 3. I'm a little busy right now, but I definitely could think of people who I think might be willing to help! Especially middle/high school students who are advanced in math but bored out of their minds at home right now and would like a cool extracurricular to add for college apps. 4. Time and time again I've seen Q&A / Forum aspects help so so much. If there's a way for people to ask clarificatory questions about videos or posts and get upvoted answers, that would be so helpful for understanding (and hopefully for you to find and correct mistakes or find places that need for clarification.) I've seen Khan Academy (which I know you worked on a bit) and DuoLingo implement this fairly well, as well as the standard Stackexchange (though that tends to be more general / less of a community than what I believe you're aiming for). Overall, very excited that I may soon have webpages I can direct people to rather than multi-minute-long videos. Many of my friends are time-sensitive when learning things, and having the webpages will make me far less hesitant to share your amazing tutorials because they can quickly scan the content and make the time judgement for themselves.

Often times you take a different approach than most taught at school or university, it’ll be helpful to have concise information like an abstract, a summary of the key methods or a fact so that your target audience (whom you could decide for each video) is able to, hopefully, reproduce or recall the process described in a video with these as prompts. This will help with active recall. For more advanced topics, I usually can’t understand a video’s content without first learning it in a class, but I do find your videos quite insightful afterwards as to why the rules and relationships are true, which are learnt in introductory courses but frequently without the reasons given. If there are vocabulary summaries or directed pages to undefined but used mathematical terms in the articles, such as the term “winding frequency”, I think it would make the articles more accessible. I also like the idea of a commenting area where people could discuss and often clarify between them what a certain term means, how a step came about, etc. I could see the article format being used for reading for a class, but not the direct transcripts of videos, which are meant to be capturing and in a fast-paced video, not understanding a question wouldn’t stop me from keeping playing it. But in reading, I would hope each word is better thought through so that most people know precisely what is meant by a question or a comment, given some hints to answering the questions by themselves. I think a higher potential to clearly understand something or something about that thing is also a quality that would draw me to read about it in my free time. I think pretending to be writing notes to a future self who possibly has forgotten most of a topic requires a good understanding of the connections between everything that’s written down, it would be beneficial to the note taker. I would be interested in writing notes based on a video for a weekend or a school break. But an abstract, key method or vocabulary list might be better conjured up by the creator with people who already know the concepts well and have thoughts on which concepts are essential for each of them to understanding some of the highlights of a video. Although this sounds messy, I think readers could benefit from multiple voices like from listening to a podcast discussion.

Still a big lover of videos. I'm not sure how much I'll read blog types posts. But for a physical book, oh Yeah, I'm in. Can I pre-order? : )

Verify much in favor of written versions of the videos!

1. I would definitely find written versions helpful, and not just for skimming/reference. I think videos do a lot to help me build intuition and just enjoy the overall story or idea, but when I want to get into the details I'll usually turn to written content because I can navigate it at my own pace. 2. I find still images are better than animations/interactives for jogging my memory. A physical book also sounds great :) 3. I'd love to help with something like this! 4. Small thing, but: linked/expandable/hoverable footnotes and definitions

Just a hint, the famous German physicist is called "Erwin Schrödinger". If you have problems with the Ö you can replace it by OE, but both is wrong. Also there's a c between s and h. That being said, I don't think a written-down version of your videos would be useful, at least not for me. I have always been able to follow along nicely, and the constant being-entertained by videos online has made it very hard for me to thoroughly read something. Also, you really shine when it comes to topic that lend themselves to great visualizations, and I'm afraid that magic would get lost when you try to move to a different medium. I also don't really own physical books nor do I plan to, at least wrt. maths. That being said, I do look forwards to the Matrix exponentiation video. Keep up the good work!

Honestly I prefer your videos a lot more. Your khan academy stuff got me through a lot of calc3 at college so it's definitely useful but I think it comes down to what really makes your channel unique. There are lots of people who write pretty good articles, but almost no one who has your level of polish and visual intuition when it comes to mathematics. Like when I was doing linear algebra last year I found plenty of written material that helped, but only your videos really made it click and helped me visualize. The tight editing and extremely well structuring won't really come across the same. But it can be interesting to see if you want to go interactive with js (maybe d3, threejs, webGL) that can add a new level of interaction that a video can't. https://distill.pub/2019/memorization-in-rnns/ - I think this is a good example of how interactive visualizations can really help out. I'm not sure how much I can help, but I'd love to be able to.

1. I would find written versions helpful, mostly for reference / refresher because they're quick to search through. 2. The print mode would be useful to me because for reference, I prefer all the local critical information together in one place, but the motivation / animation in a separate place. As a student, I think a classroom would pretty much much always choose a video if they can, but lots of schools have bad internet so I do think it would be useful for school. For a fun reading, I find video more engaging than reading, but some people are the other way around, so I do think it would be useful. 3. I would be willing to help with a project like this, but I don't know anyone who would be. 4. Interactive stuff, epically changing the value of variables, like the quaternion thing with Ben Eater. Translating to other languages is probably easier in text.

Cole

I agree that articles could be really good, especially for a quick reference. Interactivity in said articles would be really cool, something a la mathigon.org. But it would be a lot more work too, so more of a "nice to have." I felt that the example blog/print mode on the Fourier Transform was a little bit long. It was harder to follow than the video, particularly with the idea of "wrapping frequency." But other topics might work better, like linear algebra or essence of calculus.

For me, the format and medium of YouTube has been an educational revelation. No better way to convey a broad, solid introduction to a topic, than a 10min video. Many years ago, I used to write educational articles on programming for various print magazines.. and even in that format I always tried to "tell a story" in the space of a couple thousand words. Homo Sapiens teaches and learns through story-telling. :) But I think there are many different learning styles, and reading text is much easier for some folks to internalize concepts, than listening to words spoken while watching flashy animations. (Myself, I always keep one finger on the 'pause' key when watching 3b1b videos.) And certainly, if I ever want to dive one level deeper than is possible in a 10min video, I quickly turn to written material. Maybe because that's usually all that's available? But no, there are many (multi)hour-long lectures available online these days, and those rarely seem effective or helpful to me. It's nice to be able to scan page to page quickly.. ctrl+F to search for specific keywords.. skim past irrelevant sections vs highlight/bookmark the relevant sections.. maybe even copy and paste formulas, data, links to other sources, etc. So, I'm all for this. Heck even if it's just a screenplay prinout of your video, word for word.. it would be useful to search, and refer back to.

Shawn Van Ness

A written counterpart will certainly make the navigation of the content easier for those who want to selectively find information, but there’s a challenge of translating the visual focal point and narrative movement into non-linear format. Some of the best part of the video is explained by the animation, not just a single chart, but the movement of the layout. I can see an interactive written content format that still maintain some of that nature but the development cost is fairly high. (Example: https://pudding.cool/2018/02/waveforms/) As for a “print” print format, I’m not sure if that really works for the content. Almost all physical text books fails to intuitively deliver what you do, namely using moving imagery to demonstrate transformations, movements, incremental calculations, etc.

Garbanarba

1. I'd definitely find written versions of the videos useful, particularly with respect to the potential for "nonlinear exploration". With a video, you have to create a single timeline that hopefully engages as many people as possible while losing as few people along the way as possible. With writing, there's a lot more flexibility to include hyperlinks and sidebars for people who want to directly delve deeper into tangential topics covered in the article, for people who are rusty on those topics and want a quick refresher, and for people who've never learned those topics before and want to acquire a bit of background before proceeding with the main article, all without interrupting the flow of the main explanatory thread. Or at least, that's my perception of it — i'm admittedly a bit biased, since i'm more of an articles person than i am a videos person myself. :) 2. Yes, if it was interspersed with reflection questions or test-your-understanding questions that made the reading more of an active two-way street than the usual passive one-way street that many textbooks exemplify 😁 3. I would love to help with a project like this! I'm currently at a career crossroads in the math education space, and would love to contribute to something like this that's more creative and off-the-beaten-path 😊 4. Community! It's impossible to anticipate and address every uncertainty that any reader will have, but a forum space on each post (akin to what exists on StackExchange or Brilliant) would give readers the opportunity to provide alternative perspectives and respond to the uncertainties of others. (With the best reader explanations/additions getting upvoted to the top, perhaps.) Knowing the general 3B1B audience, i expect there'd be little shortage of people who were willing and enthusiastic to contribute their perspectives in this way, within a container that's a little more focused than a Youtube comment section.

Dan Kinch

Since your videos usually bring a unique perspective to each topic, I can see how a written version would have value. However, for a lot of topics there are already a number of excellent texts, compared to an almost total lack of good videos, so personally I believe your time is better spent focusing on the videos.

yes! please a physical book

Janik

Hi Grant. Regarding the written form, I'd suggest aiming for the end state from the beginning - which is a book, right?. If everything was already in article form, my guess is that would be your next step. Also, I think a book designed as a book from the beginning will be better than a book designed as a collection of articles. Also, I wonder if a one-to-one pairing of written articles to videos is the right move. I think the best choice of topic bundles depends on the medium. Videos need to be more stand alone, whereas a book can rely on the reader already having a lot of context, since presumably they're reading the book from the beginning. I bet this is more work. And it doesn't leave a nice spot for your animations, outside of still images. But over the long run and if you think the book will certainly eventually happen, than maybe there is some efficiency gain here. Also, I would totally purchase the book, but probably wouldn't read the articles if I've seen the videos. Just my two cents!

Mutual Information

I am looking forward to your series on systems of differential equations, linearization at equilibrium points and matrix exponentiation to find the solutions and determine stability at an equilibrium point. I teach this subject but would love too have your excellent videos to intuitively show my students what is involved pictorially. I use many your other videos for this all the time.

+1 for future book(s) edit: thinking more about this, I would hate to impose drag on Grant's new content creation 🤔 I am rescinding my vote for future book(s)

I am intrigued by the idea of having the material on some cohesive topic turned into a physical book! The book will be a great companion to the videos for reviewing and referencing, and being from 3b1b, I am sure the book will be as beautiful as the videos. If you think there are enough people who would find it useful to buy a physical book, then this could be a win-win as this should hopefully generate extra income to help you capitalize further on the great content you have made 👌

I like the idea of a written form of the articles alot! For me, your interactive website/video about quaternions is an ideal example of how this could work. If i feel more like listening, i can watch the video, if i feel more in a playful experimentation mood, i can stop the video and explore the interactive visualization to get an intuitive feel for the topic and if i want to go deeper i can read and learn some more theory and can reflect on that. This combined format feels great to me. I also like the idea of a living article, something that can be refined and improved over time but can also be read as an article. An example in that direction that i like a lot are openly developed books, e.g. http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/ comes to mind. Here the book can be read online, but each paragraph has a comment section for feedback and improvement that the author can draw from. I also like a lot interactive articles, i already mentioned your interactive quaternion website, another good example for me being the NY Times Buy vs. Rent calculator: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html Hope the feedback helps, i'm excited where this is going! :)

Varied media can only add to accessibility, and as someone who finds it a lot easier to process written information than video or audio (though your videos are generally easier to deal with than most people's), I fully support making written versions.

Also, I'd be happy to help wherever I can

I can see how the written form would be useful when going over a topic covered in a video one's already watched, although I'd always go to the video first. Where I think it could really add to the experience and one's understanding (and I think you mentioned it in a podcast with Lex Fridman) is if there were interactive demos one could play around with on the website. I know that it would add yet another layer of complexity to the whole process and would be more work, but I think being able to interact would be amazing. I sometimes find myself coding some of examples myself just to have a play around with and it may allow the viewer to explore something you didn't have time to put in the video. Even if it were just a few sliders, changing a frequency, angle of a rotation matrix etc.

Hi Grant! I think it is a very good idea to have the videos in the form of articles, I like the videos but I'd really like a good article since as you said, sometimes I have to see a whole video only to get one tiny part of it that I was looking for. For the point 3, I can help, also I am Spanish native speaker so I can also help with translations. Looking forward for the next videos! Best regards, Tomás

More on videos on diffy Qs. This would be great.

Hello Grant. So to answer your first question: Kind of. The Fourier transform video is one I had to watch a few times to grasp fully. I think a lot of what helped is the animations and your voice in the background, I’m not sure how helpful would it be to watch a video and then read your explanations, unless you would still like to narrate in the embedded videos, in which case the purpose writing a blog would be defeated. I would say that, so long as I’ve already watched a video, the blog form is quite useful in terms of it being a reminder, a refresher or another perspective (another way to explain it) on the topic that I already know. I already sort of understand what you want to say already, I just need to read it again, or I need another perspective on it. So if I already knew the Fourier transform before your video, the perspective you offer would be much better communicated in blog form. So yes, insofar as it is a reminder or a different way to explain what I already know it is useful. Your second question: Again, yes, a leisurely read, but only as a refresher. I think the fourier transform is a bad example for my case, cuz it was hard. If it was another topic, like probability, then I would think that the print form would qualify as a leisurely read. I’m not sure about classrooms, haven’t been in one for almost a year now. As of your third question: I’m still in Calc 2, so Idk if that would help. As of your fourth question: oh sorry, I don’t know. Maybe if I see a few other examples, and then start to think of what would make the topic of the blog/video more concrete. But I think quizzes is quite a good idea. Yes, it was quite strange to me how we didn’t continue the differential equations. I was like “is that it? Is there something else? Is there a chapter I’m missing? Why did we start probability?”

Doubly Triple

Specifically for topics that aren't typically written about in article format online-- like ODE's, PDE's, or linear algebra-- it would be really useful to make rigorous and concise articles about them. For myself, this would be a great addition to the visual/intuitive intuition given in video. Especially since they're topics I'm learning now and haven't yet found a single source that supplies completely.

The print versions are especially valuable for those whose second language is English. They can follow the text much more easily. Personally, I use subtitles on movies even when I can follow in a foreign language. And do not forget those who are hearing impaired as this works for them as well. To answer question # 3, yes, I am willing to help.

white beard geek

Sounds good! I am really looking forward to the chapter about Schrödinger's equation. Btw: You made a little typo there… "Shröedinger"… Some of the confusion is probably based on the "translation" from German: He is actually called "Erwin Schrödinger", however with non-german keyboards it is quite common to replace "ö" with "oe" (or even just "o"), hence "Schroedinger" instead of "Schrödinger" is also common…

I definitely value print versions, even for content that works best as a video. One specific reason that I think other people might share is that whether or not the original learning/exposure is through a certain media, it is easier to quickly look back to reference or refresh from print. I would personally enjoy having print versions available of content I've already seen in a video.

Looks good and I agree that some people do prefer to be able to read at a leisurely pace and go back and forth through the text during that exercise. Happy to help out in any way, my experience and knowledge probably more in the probability and applied financial mathematics space

Nice! 👍