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An elephant hair?

I had an unusual learning experience in my under graduate numerical analysis course. I will share it with you. The learning process proved to be phenomenal for all of us involved. Although the story appears to be about me, it is really about a professor lighting a creative fire. Professor Mayes lite that fire for me and my classmates with a remarkable experiment. I am a physicist/inventor and have always enjoyed mathematics. I enrolled in the numerical analysis course because it could be taken as an elective. The math classes took less of my time than other electives. Professor Mayes taught the course in an unusual manner. The entire class actually did the teaching, he supplied the metod. In his first lecture he informed us that we would have no textbook, we would write the textbook. He would state a true conclusion at the end of each class and if someone could prove it to the class then the next problem would be given to us. He stated, it would be a waste of time to look for solutions in the library, because there was no book to be found in the library which contained any of the proofs. I presented the proof the next class period and he presented the next challenge. This continued until the last weeks of the lectures. At that point I had made every proof. I had begun to believe others were suffering in learning the material. That did not turn out to be the case. In the last weeks of the course others began to volunteer and present their solutions. At the end of the course the number of voltmeters increased to a half dozen The amount of material covered in that class was eminence. The students (around 30), to my surprise, all made excellent grades on the final exam. Several of those students were later in a graduate analysis class I took later. That graduate analysis class turned out to be a lively one in which the students often challenged Professor Decell, a NASA supervisor, on the material he presented.

Your presentations have a quality which is infectious, in the sense of discovery. This will be difficult to maintain should you attempt to expand the number of people involved. Perhaps, you will discover a technique for accomplishing such a feat:?) If you do, Epiphany for you. Feedback is one of essential elements in physics and mathematics perhaps you will find an inventive analog in your mathematical teachings.

Hello Grant, this is my first post on your channel so I wanted to start by saying that I love your content! I am a firm believer that learning material from different perspectives is a powerful tool for gaining a true understanding of the concept. And visual intuition is not highlighted enough in many formal education settings. On that note, it seems like a major missing piece in many curriculums is non-linear dynamics. You have touched on the idea with fractal videos, etc. But do you ever see yourself putting together a video or series on the topic? Keep up the great work!

I agree completely with your decision. Keep going on, your work is amazing. I give private lessons and use parts of your videos in lessons.

Jorge Sinde

Right now, to be published very soon, is one on divergence and curl. It's part one of a two-part set which will show how complex functions can be used to model interesting setups like fluid flow and certain E&M problems. I'd like to tackle quantum computation in the near future, and visualizing quaternions as well.

3blue1brown

Hey Grant, best wishes from South Africa, support your descision to revert to solo even though more 3b1b could never hurt, I understand where you are coming from. On a different note, what kind of content can we expect in the near future or is there anything specific you are currently working on?

Finally! I think I figured it out by myself. Is it the method "Randolph()"? Also, I would be very glad to know how to change the size of the coordinate system in "coordinate_systems.py", simply adjusting the "line_frequency" seems to result a rather wired looking graph, thanks Grant.

Dear Grant, please teach me how did you make the animation of a Pi creature moving on the grid ACCORDING TO THE COORDINATE in your video "Vectors, what even are they? Essence of linear algebra, chapter 1", 6:21, I'll be so glad to know, It's pretty important to me, thank you.

Good luck Grant! Growth is hard, and sometimes you need to re-calibrate and turn back to see how to do it correctly. Keep going!

Hi Grant, i support your decision to go solo and i feel fulfilling to be a patron of your work. Quality over quantity is my mantra too. Your videos have given me so much more clarity than what i learnt in undergrad and graduate level in chemical engineering. I look forward to your detailed videos on probability, as i want to understand it deeper, thanks!

Rajesh

« spend as much of my time as I can creating content and learning/teaching new math, not running a small organization that creates content. » You're facing the dilemma that many artists / craftmans are living between their passion and the necessity to become the boss of a small business. Many choose to get a partner to manage the business aspect but that could be dangerous if the partner is not trustable. Often «small is beautiful».

I'm glad you liked it! I have tentative plans to do a sort of follow-on about quantum computation, since I think light polarization can be a nice toy example for understanding a qubit.

3blue1brown

I enjoy your content and would probably have passed vectors and matrices at university of you had been around. But the video that blew my mind the most was on quantum mechanics. Reading books and YouTube videos had not tired it all together like you did. Thanks David

You have one of the best math related channels on YouTube. In my oppinion, the best. I started your videos returning to school in Pre Cal. Now I'm about to finish my dual Engineering degree with Math. I can say with certainty, you've made a difference. I think your style is universally loved by the viewer base. Regardless of what you do, I hope it remains something you enjoy doing.

Keep doing the good work on, Grant. I know what it means to put a video together. It takes me a few tens of hours and I still have not added animations, just static graphics. And I came to the same conclusion, it's better to do what you do alone. You gave me the idea to add to my channel some Math Puzzles. My next video will be about it.

I meant "relation to exterior calculus, exact sequences and linear algebra.".

as a physicist, I struggled with homology/cohomology and their reaction to exterior calculus, exact sequences and linear algebra. I hope someday you can tac​le this intersection of where many topics meet in algebraic toplolog​y.

Good points - go for it.

Can't have been an easy decision grant but I support you. You made the channel what it is today so I feel you deserve to have the control over it that you want :)

AHuggingSam

Yes! Having an assistant of some kind to offload some of the many little fiddly tasks that are only tangential to creation is something I plan to do.

3blue1brown

The more people join a team the more its output will approach what everyone thinks is best. Point is, what we most enjoy are not the things we expect but those surprising us in a positive way. So I am glad to see you keep on doing just that: your contemplation was a nice surprise!

Richard Kalhöfer

Hey Grant, i am your supporter and I join to what other guys said above. You tried something new, it did not work out. No need to justify your dare. I would only suggest to may be consider hiring assistants with different motivation/skills/ego disposition than prev team. I really love the channel but I (and many others) would love to see your progressing in new endeavours. I hope you will find the ways how to scale out, without sacrificing always impeccable quality. Keep trying!

Great thinking. Sometimes less is more. Lately I've been trying to divide my life into 50% self driven productions and 50% collaborative productions - this has worked better than 100% self or 100% collab. It works the brain better. So I suggest that on whatever 'new collaborations' you do, it should be entirely 'new work' and leave your original YT channel in its purest form. Looking back in 15 years from now, that will ensure that A. Your channel is a complete whole and B. You end up making things you'd never have made on your own

I have a lot of empathy for this kind of introspection. It takes guts to find and take your own stance on what is good for both you and your content. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

DomNomNom

This sounds like a really smart decision. I just changed my pledge so that it's more per video with the same monthly limit in support of this quality over quantity approach :-)

Grant, as difficult a decision as I can sense this was, I couldn’t agree more with your rationale. By my reckoning, it’s your unique mix of talents, experiences and passions that are the essence of the 3b1b value proposition. Born in an ideal moment in history to act as a pioneer of a topical genre, I believe others will be inspired by your example and play their own roles in advancing it further leveraging their own strengths. To the question “Can I leverage the help of others to maximize my efficacy?” – i.e., leverage the benefit of my strengths while minimizing the impact of my relative weaknesses – a couple of thoughts arose: 1) Keep track of the kinds of animation / visualization vignettes you find yourself spending time repeatedly clone-modifying and hire (or invite in-kind developer-patrons) to code ‘categorical’ Python functions for incorporation into the manim code library (i.e., based on descriptive or pseudo-code requirements you might post here or in github?). 2) In the same vein, I recall you mentioning formerly the conundrum of creating a library for your own (continually evolving) needs, while opening it up for (and being open to contributions from) others who may share your interests and aims. Might inviting other developer-creators – particularly those with github library management expertise – to contribute to the project possibly offer value in the direction of resolving this? e.g., by helping organize a structured manim code base, strategic set-up of versioning & distribution, protecting your own collections, etc.? This might support advancing the ‘genre-pioneer’ role proposed above. Understand that these suggestions presume that in your creative-joy ‘objective function’ for the project, the coefficient of the “[content elegantly, intuitively conveys concept]” term >> that of “[creation of beautiful, elegant code]”. Conscientiously avoiding shame or self-judgment, of course; …requires frank introspective reflection (which clearly you’re no stranger to). My thoughts in empathy. In any case, Grant, I remain grateful to you, and for you. I look forward to continued support of your worthy endeavors.

Couldn't agree more. This is not a move I was expecting, (and it certainly puts a dent in the hopes of working for the channel one day!) but the quantity of 3B1B videos was *never* an issue for me, the quality of the videos sets the channel in a league only populated by a few others (like the ones you've mentioned).

Look, man. Quality >> quantity, especially since I already have more YouTube subscriptions than I can keep up with. I'd rather have better videos less often than the inverse.

jason black

Huge respect. Totally agree. I have seen too many excellent youtube channels going downwards in quality after gaining popularity. You don't need any other goals than producing the quality you dream about. But you know that, as you just proved it ;)

Thanks so much Lukas!

3blue1brown

Grant - I'm sure this was a tough, painful decision to make and it's great that you made it. I really admire your focus on making something good and I think you're making amazing videos.

Thanks so much!

3blue1brown

Possibly, this is actually one vector where I could see further expansion making sense. I'm generally pretty able to get the kind of visuals I want quickly enough, but if I ever wanted to really make it a polished libraries ready for anyone to pop in and use it would likely require a full-time maintenance effort.

3blue1brown

I agree there should be such a site. Curation seems extremely difficult, but then again the same is true of Wikipedia. Thanks for the suggestions on potentially uses of others. On comment I'll add is that, luckily, the actual video editing is a relatively quick process, less than 1 day for a given video. That's not to say still couldn't be outsourced, but deciding which parts are "non-critical" would probably be around the same amount of time.

3blue1brown

Thanks! An appropriate comment coming from a viewer named "Art" :)

3blue1brown

The very reason I decided to join patreon was because of the "Essence of..." series is simply too good and I assumed they were both harder and less profitable than the "for fun" math videos (that I also like). I think it's worth messing around with your production methods as long as you enjoy the results and the work done.

Forgive yourself for how "infrequently" you upload videos when working on your own. Youtube is designed to favor channels that upload frequently, the more frequently the better, quality be damned. That's precisely why I support you, kurzgesagt, Veritasium, and CGP Grey here on Patreon. You and they make quality content, not quantity content, and I support that decision with my money. It doesn't matter how infrequently you upload; so long as you maintain your quality standards and I can afford it, I'll keep supporting you. I paid thousands of dollars for linear algebra classes I didn't understand, I will gladly pay a few dollars for videos that I do understand.

Adam Spangler

Agree with the above comment- there might be ways a passionate software engineer (who already cares about the project) could help you with some monotonous backend work (manim-related?); But regardless, I'll personally continue to support you as much as I can (and contribute more when I have a job!). This channel has been revelatory and life-changing with respect to my mathematical intuition, and I'm certainly not alone. My entire linear algebra class has been watching your videos as supplementary material all quarter! And don't push yourself too hard. What you've already done is an incredible contribution.

Alex Loftus

A decision that is in the direction of maintaining the original 3b1b style sounds correct to me. It's won so much praise around the internet, I think now is the time for pushing further with that original formula, not changing things up. Do you think, in principle at least, that software engineers (as opposed to mathematicians) could help you by improving the API of your animation codebase so that you are more easily able to create the animations you envisage? (I have not studied your codebase so this is not a criticism of its existing API, but you've been critical of it often enough!) While maintaining backwards compatibility of course...

Dan Davison

Thanks for the update, Grant. Just don't push yourself too hard to make videos quickly and watch for burnout.

Kevin Strehl

Some possible future uses of others: channel, advertiser, and financial management, non-critical editing (e.g. sound editing, scene transitions, aligning timing...) mathanim consolidation and documentation, and eventually, specific asset creation and documentation. Feel free to experiment. (I’m on my phone so can’t create a new paragraph. Sorry.). On the topic of supporting small channels and all the not-3b1b stuff out there: Why doesn’t there exist some resource (say, a website) out there which consolidates the best audiovisual explanations on the internet into easily-accessible learning paths, cobbling together videos and supplementary materials from wherever? Maybe it’s managed by a community, and when something better comes out, it can replace the previous thing that held that spot. This could create a meritocracy that could allow small channels to thrive... if their content makes it into the repository.

Jacob Mirra

Grant, so glad you decided to stick with the original format. While I’m sure the other contributors are very talented and have a lot to offer, I’ve always seen your work as half math, half art. You present the concepts, but you do so in a way that is very aesthetically pleasing in a mathematical and audiovisual way. As such, this kind of creativity is best left to being a solo effort to maximize the creativity and integrity of your work. Keep making awesome videos - I learn more and more easily from your explanations than I did from the math courses I took as a physics/math major. Thanks!

and on the topic of going back to one person, it is extremely hard to give up control of a work of art and passion. Your decision was right for you. While I wish there were more videos, it is more than apparent that you spend a vast amount of time trying to balance the factors that make 3b1b what has come to represent. Don’t feel that you need to diversify. I’m not entirely happy with the VSauce channel because of that split. Consider doing a MastersClass on your approach to YouTube videos including your open source tool suite. Keep up the good work - Reggie

Reginald Carey

im sure these topics and associations were in your mind when you made the video. One issue, the color blending is too subtle for phone screen order to pick up distinctions past 2-3 levels. Consider altering the visual to allow perception of the bell curve in color more clearly.

Reginald Carey

I wanted to comment on your previous video the day you posted to Patreon but things got in the way. I felt you could tie in your prior work on taylor series and uncertainty principal. There was an intuitive click for me between these topics and your discussion of probability clicked in the same way. I also felt that you skated around Pascal’s triangle and n count k.

Reginald Carey

Hard to improve on perfection :) Looking forward to your next efforts Grant

Chris Jennings

Even though I never noticed any decrease in quality from your channel, I'll admit the feeling did change since it became a group effort, some of the recent videos, although excellent, felt alot more like other maths channels on YouTube, and less like a 3b1b vid. For this reason I'm fully supporting your decision to go solo again, and there's no need to worry about the quantity of content as far as your audience goes, your strong point has always been the superb quality of every video.

Lock

Makes sense what you say. Thanks for sharing your thoughts openly in so much depth. I don't know for others, but at the end of the day I want you to produce more content in YOUR style. Collaboration always increases friction loss. Keep going, I hope you can decently live off it as a teacher/artist/mentor/guru.

Further. The output your team produced was good, what I meant by my previous paragraph is that I support YOU to do the best you can as “artist author”, even if you subcontract mundane tasks, but it was never my intention to provide all possible content with the closest to your style as possible. My intention was and is for you to distill and choose and prioritise what is each month the most significant contribution YOU can make given finite time constraints, not having to worry about your own finances, with the support of the backers. That’s the true spirit of a crowd backing an author/artist like you.

Darn UI. Retyping. Ok. I fully support your decision to actively own the content. Outsourcing tasks is ok, outsourcing content, less ok. I support your channel because your unique style allows me abd others to re-learn stuff I studied ages ago, from a graphical perspective. That’s a great thing, that should not be diluted. To be frank, I was concerned, financially, supporting volume was never feasible for me. Like many, we support your artisanal unique style.

Absolutely no problem with you wanting to do it alone. Some of the best things are from individuals working passionately on something. Looking forward to the next video!

Alistair Woodcock

Some basic maths ... Quality > Quantity :)

Christopher Burke

Thanks for your honest observations, Grant. Looking forward to your inspiring work!