TWFIYM
This weeks finds in youtube mathematics
While the MMT modelling drags along, it’s nice to take a few breaks from the pain of ongoing mass ignorance of monetary operations, to enjoy a bit of classic lecturing. (I do not plan on making TWFIYP or TWFIYM a regular thing, perhaps this is the only time.) My standard is to find videos that are near to Feynman’s Cornell lectures level.
Walter Rudin — “Set theory: an offspring of analysis”. (If you are sleepy, this will not put you to sleep).
Saunders Mac Lane — “Mysteries and Marvels of Mathematics” (why was this stuff not on in the afternoons when I came home from school, huh? Instead of the Flintstones, Jetsons and Scoobydoo?)
Frank Morgan — “Soap Bubbles and Mathematics”. (The dude can blow a soap bubble inside a soap bubble).
Avi Wigderson — “Randomness and pseudorandomness”. (Remarkably engaging despite some dodgy powerpoint-fu).
Hugh Woodin — “Beyond the Infinite”. Yeah, yeah, I know it seems niche, but gosh darn-it, even if you are a lousy finitist, you have to marvel at how much the human mind can comprehend that we seem to have no right to comprehend. Gödel did not destroy mathematical universality, he gave it eternal life.
For the perverts, you can find real horror shows like this one. (I guess, to be fair, that one had to be billed as a technical seminar?)
But also some which seem like horror shows, but which are in fact pretty incredibly inspirational, despite level of comprehensibility near 3, like this one from Richard Hamilton on Perelman’s proof. Why is it so good? I truly cannot say. Probably because every sentence is vaguely comprehensible, but the sum is unfathomable, yet the whole is back to fathomable: “do surgery to remove the places the Ricci flow blows up.”
