What Makes People Engage With Math | Grant Sanderson | TEDxBerkeley

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Published 2020-03-13
Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) is the founder of the math outreach and education YouTube channel 3blue1brown, which has over two million subscribers and over 85 million total views. He’s collaborated with many other online educators, such as MinutePhysics, Smarter Every day, Ben Eater and more. The topics covered on the channel range from pure math, like prime numbers and strange occurrences of pi, to more applied topics, like neural networks, physics, and how cryptocurrencies work, and from topics commonly seen in school, like calculus, to ones outside a traditional curriculum, like fractal dimension. Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) is the founder of the math outreach and education YouTube channel 3blue1brown, which has over two million subscribers and over 85 million total views. He’s collaborated with many other online educators, such as MinutePhysics, Smarter Every day, Ben Eater and more. The topics covered on the channel range from pure math, like prime numbers and strange occurrences of pi, to more applied topics, like neural networks, physics, and how cryptocurrencies work, and from topics commonly seen in school, like calculus, to ones outside a traditional curriculum, like fractal dimension. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx
All Comments (21)
  • @anikettiratkar
    His TED talk released on 3/14, this cannot just be a coincidence.
  • @fyradur
    I think Grant is one of the most important people alive today. Imagine how many incredible mathematicians in the future would have been inspired and persuaded into mathematics because of him.
  • @shire7949
    When people were applauding and laughing, I can imagine him thinking.. 'Look at me Feynman, are you proud?'
  • @ephi124
    "If you have a soul, you have to know why."
  • @TylerHallHiveTech
    It’s weird to tie his voice with a body. Like I subconsciously think his voice and videos just kind of manifested on YouTube because some math equation just produced it. But man this guy is good. Makes me love math. And I have a difficult love/hate relationship with math as an engineer.
  • @vivekprabhakar3331
    This guy is so passionate about teaching Math that it shows in the way he talks. I work at a Bank. Probably I will never use any of the Math he talks about. But...I never miss any video featuring him because some of the dust of his passion falls on me too.
  • @NoriMori1992
    "Imagine an art class in which they only teach you how to paint fences and walls, but never show you the paintings of the great masters. Then of course you will say, 'I hate art.' But in fact what you would really be saying is 'I hate painting the fence.' And so it is with mathematics, that we teach our students how to paint fences, and never show them the mathematics of the great masters." — Edward Frenkel (The Numberphile Podcast: "Coffin Problems with Edward Frenkel")
  • @mkoldewijn
    This man was made for presentations. The voice, the tempo, the stance, it all works. So soothing. 3blue1brown is such a good channel to watch!
  • @uzairm3816
    I think this quote by Paul Lockhart perfectly conveys his point "Also, as I said before, just because a subject happens to have some mundane practical use does not mean that we have to make that use the focus of our teaching and learning. It may be true that you have to be able to read in order to fill out forms at the DMV, but that’s not why we teach children to read. We teach them to read for the higher purpose of allowing them access to beautiful and meaningful ideas. Not only would it be cruel to teach reading in such a way— to force third graders to fill out purchase orders and tax forms— it wouldn’t work! We learn things because they interest us now, not because they might be useful later. But this is exactly what we are asking children to do with math."
  • @henryh2985
    The issue is when people create the mental block that they can't do math, resulting in low confidence and little effort
  • @honkhonk8009
    School makes math seem like mental torture. Reality makes math seem like a fun puzzle almost. Its just how our school teaches it
  • @elischlossberg5275
    I'm starting my PhD in math soon and Grant is a big reason why. His way of teaching makes all these complex topics so clear to the point that the beauty really jumps out of them. Whenever I teach my students I try to steal his style, make the lesson a question of discovery instead of just learning the raw information behind it. What is it that we're asking about and how could we even approach such a topic?