Grant Sanderson reviews math memes and riffs on dividing by zero, projective geometry, p-adic numbers, and why math education gets calculus and trigonometry wrong. It's informal and funny, the kind of thing that makes you want to understand what mathematicians actually think is weird.
And now for a bit of fun, here's math meme review with Grant Sanderson, aka 3 Blue 1 Brown that we did after the recently released podcast conversation that you should check out. And also thank you to our sponsors DoorDash Dollar Shave Club and Cash App. Click the links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. Here we go.
I don't know if I actually know what the goal of a meme review is, but I'll just give it to you. All right. So on. Calm down, calm down. A Just what do you make of.
The absurd fact that when you divide by zero that's not allowed. That breaks the universe?
My review is that the devils in the upper right quadrant aren't nearly appreciative enough of projective geometry. So that's my review of them.
Oh, yeah.
Okay. This is the machine learning insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Yeah, machine learning is doing it over and over again, but bigger. So sometimes quantity has a quality all of its own.
Yeah, scale. Just like with GPT3. There's some magic that happens.
Yeah. Einstein didn't have 175 billion parameters.
That's interesting.
That's my review of that meme. This one, Whatever numbers you think, whenever you think you know numbers, my review is it's not sufficiently mindful of diversity concerns and how the P ADICs are consistently underrepresented in people's conception of what the different number systems are. So I think it's. I'm going to say narrow minded. Is my review of that one. You study college level math? Yes, I am almost done with my bachelor's degree. So you know a lot of math. This one is uncomfortably true.
This is to our point is when you get your degree in math, there's.
A lot left to know.
That's not even.
It's hard. Oh my God.
I think there's a. So what is that? I think that's a fish eating a cat.
No. So it's a cat eating a fish and then the. The fish eating the cat. So I just have to say a. This should be in every algebra textbook. That's my meme review.
I poured root beer into square glass. Now I just have beer.
Tired, not impressed. Engineering got Mythbusters and such. Physics.
Oh, this is per our discussion. Yes, this is a part of discussion.
No one thinks that you could popularize math. That's interesting. So it ends with element. That is insightful, poignant.
So do you think there could be a cosmos for mathematics?
Yeah, I think there's huge appetite for it. I think Numberphile proves this fact.
I mean, that's true, but there's not for some reason. Do you think there'll be a Netflix show one day with.
Anyone at Netflix is watching this. I will host it for you. You just call me.
But do you think you could have.
And.
A general public kind of show like Cosmos and do mathematics 100%?
I think it wouldn't be easy because you've got this tight line between are you doing it substantively or are you just waving your hands? I think there's enough really interesting math that you can substantively get across. And I do think there's a pretty big appetite for it. The reason I say Numberphile isn't just that Numberphile is great, but that Brady has 10 projects of very similarly styled channels and Numberphile is the biggest among them by far.
But they're all successful.
They're all successful. But I would have guessed if you were just pitching these products 10 years ago, like, oh, the channel on physics will be very popular. The chemistry one will be pretty popular. The numbers one. I don't know, some people that might be like third or something. But the idea that the one about math is the most popular of his channels by far, even though they're similar styles, I do think speaks to the fact that there is an unsatiated appetite for real, a real understanding of what gets mathematicians going. And I think a Netflix type entity might recognize that.
You heard it here? Netflix.
Half off haircuts.
Oh, it's getting shaved every time. It's shaving half of the remaining hair. That's great.
I love it.
It's kind of brilliant.
That's my review. No substantive descriptions. Just I love it.
Oh, I actually saw this one for a print.
Yeah. Co teaching Secant and Cosecant. You deserve to be quiet over there. Who needs you?
Oh, you don't give them the love. Do you think sine cosine tangent doesn't.
Make the calculus of tangent look a little bit more compact while kind of be confusing to every single calculus student there? That's like, wait, what was secant again? Just write it as one over cosine squared. It's not that many more symbols.
Oh, you're contributing to the problem. Well, thank you for doing the most absurd thing I probably have ever done. You probably have ever done. I appreciate it.
