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.

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.

We’re bringing back by popular demand Dangerous Knowledge, the BBC’s 90-minute documentary that takes a close look at four mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose thinking profoundly influenced modern mathematics but also drove them (or so the program argues) to insanity and eventua

Starting back in 1995, Keith Devlin, a Stanford math professor and popular science writer, began making appearance’s on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, where he demystifies math questions, both large and small, that have a bearing on our everyday lives.

Yesterday’s lackluster Academy Awards ceremony may have afforded you some unexpected time for contemplating life’s more urgent questions, such as the one British comedian Alan Davies pursues above:  How long is a piece of string? Watch Davies, who is also a frequent panelist on the popular Stephen Fry-hosted quiz show Quite Interes

Long ago, long before MIT hatched plans for its OpenCourseWare initiative, the university taped a lecture series covering the equivalent of a freshman-level calculus course. Released in 1970, the introductory class taught by Herbert Gross was suited for any student brushing up on his/her calculus, or learning the subject for the first time.

Last month, we posted a dazzling clip – Hans Rosling tracing health trends within 200 countries over 200 years, using 120,000 data points, all in 4 minutes. Pretty quickly you saw why Rosling has earned a reputation for presenting data in extremely imaginative ways.

What would 873 x 982 look like? Lots of lines. But still intriguing. Thanks Allison for sending this our way.

Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, focuses on ‘dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world’ (as his TED bio well notes). And he has established a reputation for presenting data in extremely imaginative ways.

There’s high drama in the classroom at the University of Central Florida. Richard Quinn, a longtime business instructor, gives 600 students their mid-term exam. Then comes the anonymous tip that cheating is rampant. Forensic analysis bears that out. Ultimatums are made. Moral lessons drawn.