Grant Sanderson is known in the educational space for many incredibly well produced videos on his 3Blue1Brown Youtube Channel. His videos are mostly about math, but sometimes he visits neighboring areas such as computer science.
To be able to produce his videos, he developed a Python library called Manim, which is very useful for creating complex mathematical animations. There are two main versions of Manim: the original by Grant (3b1b/manim), which he still updates; and a fork known as Manim Community (manimCommunity/manim), created by the community with the goal of focusing on stability, documentation, and testing. More details about the differences here.
In 2021, 3Blue1Brown launched the first edition of the Summer of Math Exposition (SoME1), which is “an annual competition to foster the creation of excellent math content online” (quote from their website).
I had never used Manim before, but I decided to give it a go. For my video’s topic, I chose the Integrated Information Theory (IIT). IIT is a philosophical and scientific theory that uses math to help explain consciousness. It’s not my goal here to explain the theory, but you can learn more about it by watching the videos below or reading the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article.
This was my entry for the SoME1:
There’s a certain learning curve to creating animations with Manim, but after a while you get the hang of it and it becomes a lot of fun, especially when you see the end result.
In 2022, for SoME2 they introduced a way for people to collaborate. I wasn’t planning on entering the contest because I already had a lot going on in my life at the time. But looking around on the collaboration forum, I found a message from someone wanting to collaborate on a video about IIT. I contacted them and it turned out to be Alexander Maier, a neuroscientist and university professor who teaches the theory! He has a lot of talks about IIT and related topics in his YT channel Astonishing Hypothesis.
We then produced a new video on IIT, and submitted it as the entry for SoME2:
Soon after, another contest opened: Physics and Consciousness Explanation (PaCE), by the TheoriesOfEverything YT channel. As this was closely related to the topic of our video, we adapted it and submitted it as our entry to PaCE1:
And in this contest our entry got 4th place, which made us very happy!
The three contests mentioned (SoME1, SoME2, and PaCE1) were sponsored by the educational website Brilliant.org, and all had prizes for the first 5 places. That’s not why we did it, but it was nice to see our video recognized in a more direct way.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about creating some animated videos using Manim to explain topics like Machine Learning algorithms. There is already a lot of good content on that topic (including some by 3Blue1Brown), but most are in English, so I’m thinking about doing it in Portuguese (I’m from Brazil).
Let me know if there’s any topic you think would benefit from having an animated explanation. It doesn’t need to be restricted to a Portuguese speaking audience, as this article is itself written in English, obviously :).