PickVidsBest Recreational & visual math Videos
The 141 Recreational & visual math videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 35 introductory, 22 intermediate, 84 for a general viewer, and 0 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are an explainer. What they share is that one picture or analogy is used to supply a missing concept. Channels you will keep seeing include 3Blue1Brown, Numberphile, Stand-up Maths.
How big is a billion? - Numberphile
Numberphile explains the long and short scales for naming large numbers, covering millions, billions, trillions, milliards and the Greek myriad, with James Grime and Tony Padilla.
Does John Conway hate his Game of Life?
John Conway talks in a short Numberphile interview about his mixed feelings toward the Game of Life, his most famous invention.
The Strange Math That Predicts (Almost) Anything
A Veritasium video on how a feud between Russian mathematicians led to Markov chains and the modern prediction algorithms built on them.
Why the World’s Best Mathematicians Are Hoarding Chalk
A short Great Big Story piece about Hagoromo, a Japanese chalk brand so prized that mathematicians stockpiled it, with some reportedly dealing it on the side.
What is PLUS times PLUS?
2swap explores lambda calculus using John Tromp's lambda diagrams, with animated beta-reductions, asking what PLUS times PLUS gives.
Base 12 - Numberphile
Numberphile's James Grime makes the case for base 12 (dozenal) over base 10, showing how twelve's many divisors make arithmetic and everyday fractions easier.
Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770%
Matt Parker follows the community effort to speed up his slow Wordle-solving code, which ended up running hundreds of millions of times faster.
Calculating a Car Crash - Numberphile
Numberphile's Ben Sparks works through the physics of a car crash, showing how kinetic energy grows with the square of speed and why stopping distance climbs so quickly as velocity increases.
BBC - The Code - The Wisdom of the Crowd
Marcus du Sautoy of the BBC demonstrates the wisdom of the crowd, showing that averaging many guesses of jelly beans in a jar lands near the true count.
Bertrand's Paradox (with 3blue1brown) - Numberphile
Numberphile interviews Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown about Bertrand's paradox, where different reasonable ways of picking a random chord of a circle give different probabilities.
Why do YouTube views freeze at 301?
Numberphile visits YouTube to learn why view counts on new videos used to freeze at 301.
Epicycles, complex Fourier series and Homer Simpson's orbit
Mathologer explains epicycles and complex Fourier series, inspired by an animation of Homer Simpson drawn with epicycles.
Matematikrevyen 2011: Banach-Tarski
A Danish university math revue music video that parodies Barbra Streisand to explain the Banach-Tarski paradox, with oranges multiplying on stage.
I built a QR code with my bare hands to see how it works
Veritasium builds a QR code by hand to explain how it works.
The Uncracked Problem with 33 - Numberphile
Numberphile with Tim Browning on the sum-of-three-cubes problem and why 33 was the lowest unsolved case.
How to walk through walls using the 4th Dimension [Miegakure: a 4D game]
A short explainer showing what walking through walls would look like with movement in a fourth spatial dimension, using the 4D puzzle game Miegakure.
epic conway's game of life
An animated, musical visualization of Conway's Game of Life showing patterns made in the Golly program.
Will We Ever Run Out of New Music?
Vsauce asks whether music will ever run out of new melodies.
Double Pendulums are Chaoticn't
A short explainer from 2swap on the chaotic behavior of double pendulums.
Flipping 10 heads in a row: Full video
Mathematician singingbanana shows how he flipped ten heads in a row, with the full uncut video and answers to viewers' questions.
Outside In
A 21-minute animation showing how a sphere can be turned inside out without creases or tears, known as sphere eversion.