Saturday, December 06, 2008

Mobiüs Transformations Revealed

In November, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society published an article by mathematicians Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness describing how they made their fantastically successful YouTube video called Mobiüs Transformations Revealed. (The article shares the video's title.) The video has now been viewed by 1.5 million people, becoming an inspiring and absolutely stellar success in mathematical education. (It was this effort that inspired me to contact the editor of Chaos to convince him--successfully--to put the video portion of the Nonlinear Science Gallery that the journal runs on YouTube. Unsurprisingly, there haven't been close to 1.5 million viewers in this case, but the more YouTube is used for creative endeavors in scientific education, the better!)

3 comments:

GFreak said...

Great link Mason!
I'll show it to my family, they love lay depictions like this.

Mason said...

The article discusses how the video was made, so that might be of interest as well.

GFreak said...

I'm definitely looking forward to the "lay depiction" of Garret Lisi's An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.

It appeals to me in that, while it's well above my head mathematically, it does retain the "beauty" of a "simple" universe.
Nice image of one projection of the Lie E8 algebra.