03/16/2013
Once in a while, when I have accumulated enough good-conduct points, the VDARE.com editors let me post something about math.
If video animations of mathematical ideas are your cup of tea, try Dimensions: A Mathematical Video. It’s actually nine videos, a total of two hours viewing time, and covers a wide range, from elementary complex number arithmetic, on to the complex line (which is of course two-dimensional, and has the interesting property that it can be perpendicular to itself), and all the way to Hopf fibrations.
There are some dull stretches and you can quibble with the presentation of topics (e.g. you really shouldn’t go from talking about regular polytopes in four Euclidean dimensions to Minkowski spacetime without at least mentioning that the latter is non-Euclidean); but the animations are beautifully done. Look at the projection of the 120-cell at 8m40s in Chapter 4.
And you can pick from several languages for the narration, including both British and American English.
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