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Several people have asked if there will be a Summer of Math Exposition this year. Although we will not do a full SoME4 with a winner selection and prizes, there will be a more casual community-driven version, which people have given the delightful name SoMEπ.

People are still encouraged to try their hand at making a piece of math exposition this summer, whether a video or a written piece, and there will be a deadline to encourage completion, August 18th at 11:59 PM (UTC-12). After this, there will be a similar peer review process to past years, ensuring people receive feedback on their work. Past years have demonstrated how this process also has the wonderful side effect of kickstarting viewership on the video entries, giving the YouTube algorithm a chance to learn cowatching behavior between all of them.

The primary difference from past years is no final selection process for winners and no prizes.

Stay tuned to this discord for full information:  https://discord.gg/WZvZMVsXXR 
See also this post for some more details:  https://3blue1brown.substack.com/p/some 

Last week Matt Parker had me join one of his "An Evening of Unnecessary Detail" events in New York. I invited Tim Blais, of the channel Acapella Science to come down, and we had a bit too much fun writing a parody of "Ain't No Sunshine" about the twin prime conjecture. 

Thanks for your warm reception of the transformer videos! For those of you looking to get some hands-on practice with machine learning, I came across this site by  @GPTandChill  which offers some coding exercises in conjunction with their lessons, which some of you may be interested in:  https://www.gptandchill.ai/codingproblems 

Feel free to share other such resources you like with others in the comments. 

A small group is experimenting with making quizzes for 3b1b videos, as part of building an app for retention questions, and they put this one together for the central limit theorem video:  https://beta.retainit.app/quiz/centrallt?r=3b1b&t=3b1b 

If this is something you'd be into, take a look, and feedback would be very welcome. 

We now have blog versions of the calculus series:  https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/calculus 

This is thanks to the efforts of Kurt Bruns. Also, thanks to many other contributors (James Schloss, Josh Pullen, River Way, Vivek Verma), many other past videos have associated written versions, typically with comprehension questions and the occasional interactive sprinkled in.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts, especially from any teachers in the audience, on whether such written versions are useful. My own motivations include:

- When I learn math, and especially when I review math, I prefer things in writing.
- It's nice to have a home for associated comprehension questions.
- In any future where I expand on this content for a printed book, it can't hurt to have what already exists in this format.

Also, on the topic of associated comprehension questions, a company Retainit recently reached out offering to make associated quizzes for lessons. The sample they offered (link below) is for the video on visualizing 2^256, I think just because it's shorter. Would you want more of these made, say for more substantive lessons like the Central Limit Theorem?

 https://beta.retainit.app/embed/quiz/256-bit-security?ref=3b1b 

Shorts barrage update:

Thanks again for your understanding while I've been moving the pile of shorts adapted from old lessons onto this channel. There's still a large pile more, and what I currently have scheduled is to keep posting some daily between now and the end of the week, then after that, have them go out only weekly every Saturday.

I don't like how posting them necessarily spams existing subscribers' notifications with snippets of old content they may have already seen, so I'm open to suggestions here. The goal is just to get them to exist in the short feed, spaced out enough to give the recommendation algorithm a chance to learn which ones people like. 

For any of you who are curious, I was just looking at the analytics for this last week, and here are some conclusions


- Even early on, it's pretty clear that shorts are an effective way to introduce new audience members to old lessons, as measured by watch time from non-subscribers on (non-short) videos.


- People who land on a long-form video by clicking on the "related video" thing at the bottom of a short tend to spend more time on that video than those coming from other traffic sources (like suggested videos). I'm not sure what I'd expect here, but it's nice to see that people discovering lessons in this way evidently come in more invested.

- If you compare the age breakdown on shorts vs. long-form, contrary to what I was expecting, the age range where you see disproportionately more people on shorts is 25-34. The percentage of viewers in the more youthful range between 18 and 24 is about the same for both formats.

I'll be curious to see if those hold up, say, 6 months from now, when activity on shorts is more purely about discovery in the shorts feed, with less contamination from subscribers landing on them through the current barrage.

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In the meantime, I'm keeping busy animating the next new lesson. It'll be another physics one (though not optics), which is probably still at least two weeks out. Stany tuned! 

FYI, I'm starting to move some shorts that I've been posting to a separate channel,  @3b1b-shorts   over to this channel. My apologies in advance if this causes anything annoying in your feeds, there is actually a good reason for it.

My current use of shorts is essentially 100% to pique people's curiosity about a topic I've done a long-form video on, in the hopes that they might leave the shorts feed to see the full lesson. Previously, I could link to the main video through the pinned comment, and there was evidence that this was working at least somewhat effectively. But then YouTube disabled all links in comments.

But! YouTube simultaneously added a feature that really nicely associates shorts with long-form videos right in the UI of the video. It's essentially everything I'd ever want. But! You can only associate a short with a long-form video on the same channel.

Hence the move. 

Given the goal of having new viewers who stumble on the topic in a short go to see the full lesson, they stand to do so much more effectively living on 3blue1brown.

As an example, the short below got more views on 3b1b-shorts than anything I've posted to this channel. And, well, cool I guess. But the real reason I made that was for the problem-solving/physics lesson explaining why the phenomenon is true, and without people following through to that, all those views feel a bit hollow.

I'm not sure what the best way to schedule this is, but I'll probably move them during the next week or two. I don't feel great about flooding the notifications of subscribers with rehashed old content, so again, my apologies if this causes anything annoying. Maybe if nothing else they can serve as a nostalgic glance at past lessons.

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As a side note, I'm not entirely opposed to making more original short-form content, it's just that my heart is in long-form explainers, and on any given day that's what I feel more inspired to sink my teeth into. Almost all math worth explaining takes much more than 60 seconds to do so effectively. 

I recently met a great guy at a conference, Dwarkesh Patel, who has a rather nice new-ish podcast (I especially enjoyed his interview with Richard Rhodes). He recently had me on as a guest, which seems natural enough to share here in case any of you are interested in taking a look. 

I had the honor and pleasure of being invited to deliver an address for the mathematics graduation ceremony at Stanford. In it, I chose to talk about one of the lesser-addressed and awkward-to-talk-about motivations for getting into math. 

Today we're kicking off the third Summer of Math Exposition, SoME3. It's an event to encourage more people to create online math explanations, with prizes and a chance to have your work surfaced to a larger audience. Learn more at  https://some.3b1b.co/ 

Full post:  https://3blue1brown.substack.com/p/some3-begins 

Last year's winner announcement video:  https://youtu.be/cDofhN-RJqg