The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Film, Math, Politics | ≅ 5 Comments
This week the British Government once again refused to pardon Alan Turing. One of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Turing laid the foundations for computer science and played a key role in breaking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. In 1952 he was convicted of homosexuality. He killed himself two years later, after [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Math, Philosophy | ≅ Leave a Comment
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life,” wrote Bertrand Russell in the prologue to his autobiography: “the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” This five minute video, a preview of a three-part series produced in 2005 for Ontario public television called “The Three [...]
≡ Category: Math, Television | ≅ 2 Comments
Countdown is a British TV game show revolving around words and numbers. In the numbers round, contestants select six of twenty-four shuffled tiles with numbers on them. Next, a computer generates a random three-digit target number and the contestants have thirty seconds to get as close to that number as possible by combining the six [...]
≡ Category: Math, Physics | ≅ 7 Comments
Infinity. It’s a puzzling concept. Is it real, or a mathematical fiction? Aristotle believed infinity could only be potential, never actual. To speak of an actual infinity, he argued, is to fall into logical contradiction: “The infinite turns out to be the contrary of what it is said to be,” Aristotle wrote in the Physics. [...]
≡ Category: Film, Math | ≅ Leave a Comment
Oliver Knill teaches calculus, linear algebra and differential equations at Harvard, and, several years back, he pulled together a fairly nifty collection of Mathematics Scenes in Movies. Over 150 films are represented here, everything from Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, Jurassic Park (above) to Alice in Wonderland (1951), The Maltese Falcon and Apocalypse Now. [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Math, Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
“Music,” Gottfried Leibniz famously said, “is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.” Computer artist Alexander Chen makes this pleasure visible with Baroque.Me, his geometric computer animation of the Prelude to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major. Chen visualized the piece by imagining [...]
≡ Category: Math, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
Canadian software developer Matthias Wandel enjoys spending his spare time creating wooden contraptions that combine a childlike sense of wonder with an engineer’s knowledge of mechanics. One of his most popular creations so far is this six-bit binary adding machine, which has tallied nearly one and a half million views on YouTube. As Rick Regan explains [...]
≡ Category: Math | ≅ 1 Comment
It’s rare that we get to cover math here. So here it goes: Adrian Banner, a lecturer at Princeton, has put together a lecture series (in video) that will help you master calculus, a subject that has traditionally frustrated many students. The 24 lectures (click here) were originally presented as review sessions for Princeton introductory [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Math, Physics, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Open University strikes again. In June, they released The History of English, a series of witty animated videos that covered 1600 years of linguistic history in ten minutes. Now, they’re back with 60-Second Adventures in Thought, another animated sequence that highlights six famous thought experiments. It all starts with Zeno’s ancient Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles. [...]
≡ Category: Math | ≅ 2 Comments
Doodling — it’s usually a sign of boredom, an escape from tedium. Vi Hart turns it all upside down, and shows how doodling can be an engaging form of pedagogy. On her web site, you will find other math doodling videos called Stars, Snakes + Graphs, Binary Trees, Sick Number Games and Squiggle Inception. The video above is called Infinity Elephants. Thanks [...]
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