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Comment by ethn | Hacker News Reader

3Blue1Brown makes great videos and offers good explanations. However, particularly with his latest Fourier Transform video, he not only gives the incorrect explanation, he makes it unnecessarily and overwhelming complicated. It is still better than the linked circles approach, but the Fourier transform can be explained more accurately in around two minutes and in three if you were to include the the definition of frequency.

3Blue1Brown is better than most but far from best.

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What errors did he make and could you link s better explanation?

He has a convoluted (no pun intended) center of mass explanation that the equation does not describe, admits that this is incorrect, and then goes onto another incorrect explanation of a strange ellipse where there is another center of mass.

I've never been able to find a good explanation online, only in some older textbooks. I've begun to fear that there are few people who are able to read equations while the others interpret the explanations of those people, where then those same old explanations gradually mutate as they propagate without reference to their source. This Stanford lecture is the best I could find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rqJl7Rs6ps

If you could name those older textbooks I'd be very grateful...

"Harmonic analysis in phase space" by Folland who illustrates the Fourier Transform with physical applications.

"The Analytic Theory of Heat" Joseph Fourier who explains the realization at length.

Thanks!

What I still don't understand is why there isn't a Wikipedia for explorables.

3b1b's videos are excellent, but if they were interactive, open-source and in a similar model to Wikipedia, people could contribute and improve upon content that is already great.

There are great examples of what is possible with explorables, see Bret Victor, D3.js, distill.pub, observablehq etc. Just no encyclopedic model yet.

> "What I still don't understand is why there isn't a Wikipedia for explorables."

write one and maybe include that fact as a resume / interview item :)

I nice companion project for it would be a tool for creating these 'explorable explanations'. Anyone know if any good attempts have been made at that yet?

https://beta.observablehq.com/collection/explorables

http://aprt.us https://github.com/cdglabs/apparatus

http://explorabl.es

https://www.reddit.com/r/explorables/

To add to your list, I recently saw an HN submission where a PhD student made a markdown-derivative with some explorable features, not sure what it was called though.

The closest I know of are the widgets in Khan Academy

All his visualizations are open source.

Could you please specify which part of his explanation is incorrect?

Make the video please, I’d love to get your take.

Who's the best?

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