Work It Out with a Pencil

July 22, 2023 8:02 AM

Animation vs. Math [SLYT 14:02] A stick figure does battle with numbers.
posted by lucidium (8 comments total)

Watching this exhausts me with the thought of how much work went into the piece, especially the duration — holy moly.
posted by bz at 10:00 AM on July 22, 2023

Quite interesting… I could follow a little of the math, but luckily when this video ended another video popped up with an Oxford math guy reacting to this video and he explained a lot of the references in the original video. I regret dropping math after high school and have been trying to learn more. Math is highly cool.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:02 AM on July 22, 2023

"Work It Out with a Pencil"
I see what you did there...
posted by speug at 11:02 AM on July 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Ah, here's an explainer video with subtitles describing all(?) of the references with some context.
posted by lucidium at 11:37 AM on July 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's all Greek to me.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:17 PM on July 22, 2023

Cool, I thought, a cartoon: that might edutain my 11 y.o. descendant. Then 2 mins in, up pops Euler's identity [e^(iπ) + 1 = 0] and I had to wonder about that intended audience. The explainer cited by lucidium brings it back to my level . . for the next 3 mins. And it's not all Greek_Ace because "ℵ" the cardinality of any infinite ordinal number has a walk-on part.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:58 PM on July 22, 2023

Wow, this is so beautifully made and totally works at a simple level of abstract cartooning with fantastic sound design. Now to find out what the hell I just enjoyed watching.
posted by mediareport at 3:05 PM on July 22, 2023

Maybe this is too obvious, and sometimes I don't get the subtle hint, but I forge on with a dad joke anyway. Did you hear about the constipated mathematician? He worked it out with a pencil.

(or is the joke implied in the post title?)

The explainer video REALLY helped!
posted by JohnnyGunn at 4:42 PM on July 22, 2023 [1 favorite]