3blue1brown Some
Jannet Nevels
In past years, point 2 was accomplished with the peer review process we ran to get an initial rough ordering of the entries. In the past announcement videos, I discussed how counterintuitively effective this process was at spurring exposure for entries, far beyond anything an announcement video from me could do.
The peer review process required active management to keep running smoothly, which James heroically handled each year, and last year we made a custom system for the event, thanks to Frdric Crozatier, which better allowed participants to share written feedback.
James, Fred, and I talked about it, and we'd be happy to facilitate a handoff of that system to the community. This requires added development to fix issues from last year, which Fred is available for, and assuming enough community members are comfortable taking responsibility for overseeing the process, you should be able to get most of the benefit from past years.
The biggest difference would be its decentralization. I won't pick top entries for prizes, questions about policies are ultimately up to the community, and with any luck, the perception of what makes an entry successful will have less to do with any final placement, and more to do with the internal sense of pride and growth from you, the author.
As a computer scientist and programmer, I would mark your Riemann zeta video as my favorite. I have extended your Riemann spiral to high heights (up to a million) and livestreamed large portions of it on my YouTube channel. I hope my Riemann zeta project will again become something of a hit on YouTube.
I've been following your channel and found about SoME this year. I'm not a contributor but would like to nominate someone. How does that work? Just in case you want to check it out here's the link to Bartosz Ciechanowski's archive:
After the third Summer of Math Exposition last year (SoME3), James and I were originally planning to give SoME something of a gap year.
There have been rumblings on the SoME discord about doing a more casual community-driven version this summer, which they\u2019ve delightfully named SoME\u03C0. There would be no prizes, no winner selection, just mutual encouragement from community members to make math explainers they feel proud of this summer.
I'm all for this! Most of the event's benefit comes from having 1) a shared deadline, and 2) a period when everyone's work gets reviewed by peers. The prizes and winner-announcement video are just the icing on top.
The peer review process required active management to keep running smoothly, which James heroically handled each year, and last year we made a custom system for the event, thanks to Fr\u00E9d\u00E9ric Crozatier, which better allowed participants to share written feedback.
James, Fred, and I talked about it, and we'd be happy to facilitate a handoff of that system to the community. This requires added development to fix issues from last year, which Fred is available for, and assuming enough community members are comfortable taking responsibility for overseeing the process, you should be able to get most of the benefit from past years.
You would submit an entry, say a video or written math explainer, and afterward, you join the peer review system to have a few other entries delivered to you for feedback. This system produces an ordered list of entries, but this time there are no stakes associated with who is where in the list. I\u2019ll likely do something to signal-boost the list, and other creators could optionally choose and feature their favorite entries.
Here we mean math very broadly, and more applied topics like physics orcomputer science are abundantly welcome. It just has to be the case that a viewer/reader mightcome away knowing something mathematical they didn't before.
The spirit of this is to encourage people who've never put stuff online before. If you want towork on something you sort of started once before, that's probably fine, but it can't besomething you already published before this contest. Optimally, you'd use this as a chance totry something new you otherwise might not have.
However the voting process will sift through the entries and give greater visibility to thebetter ones. The winning entries of this edition will determined by the vote and will berevealed at the end of the competition.
We want to encourage more people to put out explainers of math online. This is a competition where anyone can submit a video, blog post, interactive game, or whatever else they dream up, and after the deadline we will select 5 to be featured in a 3blue1brown video. Winners may also receive gold pi creatures. I mean, probably not gold gold, but it would be something unique and emblematic of your greatness.
For the rest, we will put together a playlist of the video entries, and have a list of submissions on this website1.To trade tips, share partial progress, and otherwise interact with others involved, join the discord.
Note from August 22nd, 2021: Submissions are now closed. We received over 1,300 entries, which is outstanding! Thank you to everyone who participated, we genuinely hope you keep producing online math explainers after this. We plan to announce winners by September 14th.
It's hard to overstate how powerful it is when anyone can learn something they want just by searching online. In a thousand subtle ways, when these explainers exist, projects go faster, school becomes easier, and math-phobia becomes a little bit less common.
A lot of excellent lessons and intuitions stay confined to isolated classrooms, or worse, confined to some individual's head. It takes effort to make videos, or blog posts, and to put them out there. Here, we're hoping to offer a little bit of activation energy to anyone who has thought about doing something like this, but just never got around to it.
Honestly, anyone who might benefit others by sharing their knowledge. This could include teachers who want to take what they've learned to work well in a classroom and put it online, students who want to deepen their own knowledge by putting together an explainer, mathematicians who want to get involved with outreach, engineers who want to share what mathematical tools they use on the job and how, etc.
The spirit of this is to encourage people who've never put stuff online before. If you want to work on something you sort of started once before, that's probably fine, but it can't be something you already published before this contest. Optimally, you'd use this as a chance to try something new you otherwise might not have.
Here we mean "math" very broadly, and more applied topics like physics or computer science are abundantly welcome. It just has to be the case that a viewer/reader might come away knowing something mathematical they didn't before.
The topic could be at any level, whether that's basic math for young children or higher-level math. If you're assuming a certain background level for the target audience, kindly mention it below. It's hard because we don't want to discourage topics with a very niche target audience, as those lessons can sometimes be the most valuable. However, if your lesson assumes particular expertise, e.g. a comfort with algebraic geometry, keep in mind that our judges may not fit into this category. So to actually win the contest, it's helpful if the topic is accessible to someone with, say, a background in standard undergrad math topics.
If you want to put out an explainer in another language, wonderful! Please do! But the judges here will be english speakers, so to be considered for the contest the lesson has to be accessible to them.
Clarity: Jargon should be explained, the goals of the lesson should be understandable with minimal background, and the submission should generally display empathy for people unfamiliar with the topic.
Novelty: It doesn't necessarily have to be an original idea or original topic, but it should offer someone an experience they might otherwise not have by searching around online. Some of the greatest value comes from covering common topics in better ways. Other times there's value in surfacing otherwise obscure ideas which more people should know about.
Memorable: Something should make the piece easy to remember even several months later. Maybe it's the beauty of the presentation, the enthusiasm of the presenter, or the mind-blowingness of an aha moment.
To select the final winners, a small group of judges will look through the entries with the criteria above in mind. Depending on the number of entries, we may have a step to pre-filter entries before these final judgments. In all likelihood, to be considered for the competition, we may ask you to peer review some of the other participants' submissions. This would involve looking at five other entries and ranking them 1-5 based on how well they fit the criteria above, at which point we'll use the cumulative scoring which comes from those rankings to determine a final set of a few hundred which is manageable for our judges.
For longer works, judges might not be able to consume the full video/post. Again, what's hard about this is that sometimes great explainers are longer, such as a full lecture and we don't want to discourage those. Just understand that to select winners, there is only so much time, so the substance of your work should be clearly visible with a 5-10 minute view.
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