A Duodecade of Numberphile | Hacker News Reader

A Duodecade of Numberphile

tandfonline.com

134 pointsmathgenius30 comments

I look forward to every Numberphile (and Sixty Symbols and Deep Sky and ...) video. I am pleased to hear that Brady's questions are off-the-cuff. They're so on-point that I thought they may have been discussed with the guest beforehand.

The 1+2+3+4+... = -1/12 video still seems a bit of a cheat, though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6XTVZXww

Wow I always assumed they were a loaded set of prepared questions.

> The 1+2+3+4+... = -1/12 video still seems a bit of a cheat, though!

Because in that video they do invalid operations.

Compare it to how 3blue1brown handles this - https://youtu.be/sD0NjbwqlYw?si=js8taa28UcevI0Jg&t=1166 - the video is on the Riemann zeta function and my timestamp is on his comment about -1/12 at the end. But trying to explain something in a nuanced way doesn't get the same views as dumbing it down and coming up with a clickbait title (not that 3blue1brown is struggling for views).

I understand that the two channels have somewhat different objectves and approaches but in this case one of them strikes me as much better. The top comment under the 3blue1brown video addresses this too - you don't need to additionally mystify math.

Yes, I kept waiting for them to "fess up" at the end but they didn't. Mathologer called them out on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuIIjLr6vUA

3blue1brown is the better channel imo. More interesting.

perhaps on 1 v 1 basis, but Brady's total output volume and quality across all his channels is probably unparalleled in the realm of general science outreach and education.

They both have completely different purposes, despite both being about maths.

3b1b is a channel with the goal to teach math topics in the clearest way possible.

Numberphile is about interviews with mathematicians telling stories which happen to be "in mathematics".

If you want to get a better understanding of a maths topic you're currently studying, 3b1b is the clear winner. If you want to get people to wonder about the diversity of maths topics out there, Numberphile is the better option.

Not to mention the part where it humanizes mathematicians themselves. Instead of thinking of Neil Sloane in the abstract as "the guy who started OEIS", I now have a picture of a nerdy, sweet grandpa who loves to talk about integer sequences.

This is spot on. Of all the Numberphile videos I've seen, the interviews with Conway, Graham, and Ribet stand out - as much for the non-mathematical undercurrent as the math itself. Haran built up the credibility to get access to those guys and that's no mean feat.

I've also learned a lot about specific math topics from 3b1b. It takes me a few tries to get through any video since the soundtrack causes me to doze off. Would love it if he would release versions with just his narration.

The interview he did on Adam Savage's Tested channel was really interesting with regards to how he got started and how he works in general.

https://youtu.be/7Bia-dNcBm4

In the early minutes they mention his time at the BBC - I wonder if his website articles are still in the online BBC archives somewhere.

A quick search on google makes some show up [0], though it seems that the videos are no longer accessible. They are distributed in a ".ram" file which have a rtsp:// url which seems to be unreachable.

[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/england/eastmidlandstoday/ican/index.s...

Brady is genuinely one of the best science interviewers, he seems to almost always intuit exactly where the gap in the explanation is that the interviewed person should clarify

That video was enough for me to lose all interest in this channel. Misrepresenting basic maths with something obtuse that is obviously false pushes people away from the discipline.

I came to know Brady Haran not through Numberphile but via the Hello Internet podcast with CGP Grey. Unfortunately it seems to have died off in 2020.

http://www.hellointernet.fm/

The two are still doing cortex, but I do also sometimes miss hello Internet. https://www.relay.fm/cortex

Cortex only has Grey from Hello Internet, no Brady, and the co-host is Myke.

Yeah, and the absence of Brady really shows… The other guy lacks the ability to ask insightful questions or challenge Grey in meaningful way. I miss Hello Internet

It's just a different podcast. I have listened a little bit to Cortex and it seems like a very self-referential podcast, it's about their business life which is their podcasts.

That's not Brady, it's Mike

I'm a huge fan of numberphile. I don't have a background with mathematics, but have an ADHD interest in prime numbers and their videos have scratched that itch multiple times. Videos about the Mandelbrot set or the Riemann series are deeply fascinating to me despite a lack of interest in general mathematics beyond this. I've learned a lot from this channel, but very little practically applicable. But I'll still watch every video with a 17 in it.

Very cool article. Nice to hear from Brady and others about the channel. Also cool that it is currently free-to-access.

I'd like to point out the existence of Chris Staecker's Youtube Channel, mainly focused on old analoguous devices used to compute and measure things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Q-QPsFKa4

He's a great sense of humor !

I like Numberphile, but I wasn't aware of its history of being a Google-commissioned channel:

> In 2011, Google commissioned the creation of 100 YouTube channels to boost traffic to the video-sharing site

> ...

> “It seemed very unlikely that a maths channel would catch on,” remembers Math Horizons associate editor James Grime, who was among the fledgling channel’s founding presenters.

Well, perhaps it's more likely to succeed when it's one of only 100 channels commissioned and presumably endorsed by Google. I don't know why this leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, because Numberphile really is an incredible channel with content I enjoy watching... but I guess it makes me wonder how many similar channels never got the same opportunity or exposure? FWIW, I also like 3blue1brown, although now I'm wondering if that was commissioned by Google too...

2011 was a different time in terms of starting channels, I think. Plenty of the ones they provided funding for [1] didn’t really turn into anything, but a few ended up being very big deals (Crash Course sticks out the most to me)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120210205023/https://www.youtu...

Nice find digging up that list, which makes it seem like 80%+ of those promoted channels didn't succeed. And if you exclude the "mainstream media" channels (e.g. Reuters, Slate, The Onion, etc.) which had an existing audience prior to YouTube, then the success rate is even lower. This does make Numberphile seem like an outlier even amongst the promoted channels.

> FWIW, I also like 3blue1brown, although now I'm wondering if that was commissioned by Google too...

No, but Grant Sanderson started his YouTube video career at Khan Academy before focusing completely on his own channel, so he did have the right connections to help him.

Either way, it's not like either of these channels represent mediocre content being shoved down our throats against our will. Being endored by YouTube should not change any of that.

I'm so confused by the typo in the very first word of the very first sentence. It appears they wrote "Qne" instead of "One". Is this some sort of OCR error and the source was scanned in? Or are there keyboard layouts where the Q is near the O?

I could be an intentional stylistic choice

Probably the OCR as you said. Check the PDF, there's a highly stylized leading 'O'.

Ah! I didn't even realize there was a PDF, or that this was an article from Math Horizons. You must be right.

That also explains another thing that confused me: Every time the article mentioned a specific video, it could have easily linked to them, but didn't. The magazine being the source of the article explains that too.

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