The company has made a lot of progress
The company has made significant progress. This summer, James Schloss and I ran a contest meant to encourage more people to make online math explainers. Here, I want to share with you some of my favorites. I wrote up a much fuller blog post about the event and the process for selecting winners, but let’s open here with some of the key points:
- It was extremely open-ended; meant for math explainers of any kind, any medium, any target audience, and any topic (as long as it’s about math).
- The promise was to select around four to five winners, which I would then feature in a video.
- Brilliant offered cash prizes to those winners.
- The spirit of the event is to get more people sharing their knowledge in an engaging, empathetic, and novel way.
We received over 1200 submissions, and after a peer review process, narrowed it down to a little over 100 for James and I to give a close look at. We also had around half a dozen guest judges to help us narrow down the final judgments.
Without further ado, here are some outstanding math explainers made this summer that you’re going to enjoy:
An entry from a channel called Perological opens by asking why the light reflected at the bottom of a mug seems to form a characteristic cardioid shape. The core mathematical idea that this video teaches is that of envelopes, which is a way to describe one curve using a family of other curves. What makes the video special is not just how clearly it explains the subject, but how tangible and well-chosen the examples are - all delivered with a friendly and enjoyable tone.
Another one of my picks is an absolutely mind-blowing piece of engineering wizardry. This one is a blog post written by Matt Ferraro, where he explains how he made an acrylic square. It might look innocent at first, but the post explains how light gets redirected in a fun way.