3blue1brown

Per month

Added 2019-10-21 18:13:12 +0000 UTC

Hey everyone,

Following up on the last post, I'd like to try out switching this page to a model of "per month" pledges. To list a few reasons why:

Remove ambiguity on whether to count smaller projects.
Remove ambiguity on collaborative projects (e.g. see below).
If a big project necessitating a lot of research and production is going to take more than a month, there's no pressure against that.
Per-month is easier to understand for anyone new to Patreon.

There's no action required on your end. I change the setting here on Patreon, and the amount you've currently pledged per video will be considered a monthly pledge.

The poll, asking what people feel more comfortable with, was shockingly close, with a slight and not-that-statistically-significant preference for per month. Here's a screenshot as of this writing:

I mean, wow.

The low conviction as a collective seemed to be matched by a relatively low conviction among individuals in the comments. There were some exceptions, people who seem to feel strongly one way or another, and I'm definitely sensitive to that, but given that this channel averages one big project per month, nothing about this should be that significant a change. If anything, should I stick to the goals I have in mind, it should be a better deal for patrons.

Of course, I recognize that there's a certain level of trust implicit in this, namely that I continue my full-time efforts on the channel at a steady rate. Hopefully, by now you know that there are very few things in this world I care about more than this work. Believe me, YouTubers have enough pressure to output as regularly as they can, and my main motivation will always be putting out lessons I can feel proud of, with anything financial occupying a lower-order bit than that.

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But enough of that, let's talk about the fun stuff that actually brings us all together. What new videos are in the pipeline?

I've teased the Hyperdarts puzzle already, and have a finished script with many animations. It just so happens that Brady Haran of Numberphile is in the Bay Area, and right now I think it might be fun to do this as a collaboration between our channels. But, you know, keep that hush-hush until the video is actually out there.

I'd explain the puzzle and solution largely in person on brown paper, with Brady even getting a real dartboard to use, then we'd overlay the key animations for the explanations of the more geometric aspects of the solution. I'll let you know as that gets made, collaborations always take longer than expected, but I think the cross-pollination makes it worthwhile.

The main big project I'm excited about is still the full story of e, and more generally the exp function. It'll likely be 2 or 3 videos, and the hope is that they can become a standard reference for any students whose confused about what exactly e is, or about the weirdness of Euler's formula (to include why it actually matters for physics), or why you sometimes see e^A when A is a seemingly nonsensical input, like a matrix or a quaternion. It's a big topic, but one which I don't think is covered properly with the existing videos out there.

This week I'll be at ICERM, a conference on visualizing mathematics, with this week's focus being number theory. 10% of why I'm going is that I'm one of the speakers (I'll try to be sure you and others can see the talk), and 90% is out of excitement to attend the other sessions and meet people there. A conference about visualizing math? Could you possibly get anything more up my alley than that?! I wouldn't be surprised at all if I come away with several good potential video topics and future collaborators in mind.

If you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to DM me. And as always, thank you.

-Grant