Michael, you're awesome.
There is one comment on this post.After so many terrible YouTube videos about math, about four months ago Michael Stevens made a really nice video about the Banach-Tarski (Banach-T-Rex) paradox. This video was made surprisingly well by someone who has little to none formal mathematical education, but certainly the desire and [at least basic] prowess to understand that perhaps things are not as simple in mathematics - especially when infinite objects are involved - and perhaps you can't just drop something on your audience in hope they view you as a magician. Instead, Michael tried to educate the viewers, in a fairly reasonable way, about infinite objects and the preliminaries needed for the Banach-Tarski paradox.
You can find that video right here:
Earlier today Michael posted another 20-something minutes long video about supertasks. The first half might seem a bit off to a mathematician. Especially someone who may have spent a nontrivial number of hours writing answers to questions about Thompson's Lamp, or other similar counterintuitive supertasks. But the second half is pretty damn good. The first half of the video is pretty fun, but the second half is just great.
And you can find that video right here:
And since I don't have a Twitter account, if any of you tweet this blog post. Be sure to ping @tweetsauce and tell Michael that this is not the first time I felt he's spot on awesome (and he should totally get in touch to talk about math). And that he's doing a far far better service to mathematical "weirdness" than some channels ran by academicians.
There is one comment on this post.
(Dec 09 2015, 01:20)
Every time a non-mathematician threatens to talk about non-trivial mathematics, my inner voice starts screaming - begging for mercy -and my fight-or-flight instincts tell me to get the hell out of there. This hasn't been any different back in August, when I watched Micheal's video regarding the Banach-Tarski-Paradox. It's been a while and I don't remember the detailed plot of his video, but I certainly remember my relief. I'm passionate about mathematics and people talking about it in an ignorant manner tend to offend me deeply. This hasn't been the case for Michael's video and while I recall him being informal and vague (which would seem like a deal breaker when talking about mathematical paradoxes), I thought he did a great job explaining the main ideas in an accessible and entertaining fashion. TL;DR I agree that Michael is totally awesome!