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Comment by ajs1998 | Hacker News Reader

ajs1998

This is why I think Brady Haran is one of the coolest living mathematicians. Numberphile is educating a new generation of young mathematicians for anyone with access to youtube. Accessible math communication is so important. So many cool things are buried in textbooks and papers the average person would never read.

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Numberphile doesn't do any education. That's like saying the Discovery Channel is educating a new generation of zoologists.

I simply don't care to gatekeep what counts as education. It has taught me things from videos I can still recall a decade later and pushed me to explore different areas of math I wouldn't have done otherwise.

It's education for whoever finds it educational

If topics are presented engagingly these efforts will no doubt inspire the next generation.

Young people are curious, sometimes all they need is a spark and to be introduced to a new topic in an engaging way. These forms of content deliver that spark.

I believe that I have learned cumulatively double in the past 10 years from YouTube compared to what I learned in 6 years of middle and high school. And I don’t spend 8 hours per day on YouTube.

Plumbing, react, combinatorics, real analysis, python, c++, cad, micro and macro economics, reinforcement learning, to name just a few of the things I learned through YouTube.

We don’t give enough credit to what we take for granted today.

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea" -- Saint-Exupery

This is exactly what Numberphile does. Those who are hooked will find the resources on their own. They need a reason to look for them and Numberphile gives them one.

I agree with that, but inspiration is not education. If you watch everything Numberphile has produced, you'll come out of that with no new skills and trivial new knowledge.

Pedantically speaking you may be correct about Numberphile, but many times Numberphile provided the exposure and critical nudge to follow up on a piqued curiosity. That did end up imparting new skill.

However I will push back on the claim that inspiration is not education. It may not be sufficient on its own when resources are not readily available. But now that they are it's the inspiration and persistence that are the missing magic sauces.

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