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Fractals: The Inter-dimensional Journey
What if I tell you the Romanesco Broccoli is coming from another dimension?

If you tried to eat it before, you would probably believe me right away. But we are here to explore some other properties rather than their exceptional taste!. It has a form of natural approximation of a 'fractal'. Each conic section is composed of a series of smaller cones, all arranged in a spiral.
 
Although its self-similar pattern continues at smaller levels, the Romanesco Broccoli is only an approximate fractal since the pattern eventually ends when the size becomes very very small. But in fractal geometry, we can repeat a particular pattern or a rule infinitely many times to create smaller and smaller copies of themselves.
 
And apparently, natural selection prefers fractal-form structures so that we can see them everywhere in nature.
But why are fractals spooky?
In geometry, we know that a line segment has "1" dimension. When we double its scale, its length doubles itself.
A square has "2" dimensions. It has a length and a width, so it covers a surface, and when we double its scale, we see four of the initial square.

A cube has "3" dimensions. It has a length, width, and height, so it has a volume, and when we double its scale, we see eight of the initial cube.

So all the dimensions we know (or are aware of) are integers. 

Can something have a dimension somewhere in 1and 2, or between 2 and 3?

Can a shape have a 1.5 dimension?

Spooky fractals are here to answer these questions. Let's see what happens if we use the same logic to find their dimensions.

romenosco.jpg
Image by Martin Rancourt
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Sierpinski Triangle

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Sierpinski Carpet

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Menger Sponge

So fractals do have non-integer dimensions. That is really scary for the Flatland community. 

There are more surprising facts about their inter-dimensional journey.

Let's start with a line to create the Peano Curve or the Hilbert Curve. Since they cover an entire plane, they are 2 dimensional. Amazing right?

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Peano Curve

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Hilbert Curve

Check out the Wikipedia page about the Hausdorff dimensions of fractals.

Fractal Geometry is a great place where you can find many things to surprise you. You may want to check out a whole unit of tasks, activities and lesson plans to explore more about fractals at the Tasks page of Polypad.

There are amazing videos about fractals. Here is a playlist  to have a general ideas as well as the specifics of the Fractal Geometry.

But why is a sphere's surface area four times its shadow?
15:51

But why is a sphere's surface area four times its shadow?

The formula is no mere coincidence. Help fund future projects: https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown An equally valuable form of support is to simply share some of the videos. Special thanks to these supporters: http://3b1b.co/sphere-thanks Discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Blue1Brown/comments/a2gqo0/but_why_is_a_spheres_surface_area_four_times_its/ The first proof goes back to Greek times, due to Archimedes, who was charmed by the fact that a sphere has 2/3 the volume of a cylinder encompassing it, and 2/3 the surface area as well (if you consider the caps). Check out this video for another beautiful animation of that first proof: https://youtu.be/KZJw0AYn6_k Calculus series: http://3b1b.co/calculus Thanks to these viewers for their contributions to translations German: @Dat-Pudding Hebrew: Omer Tuchfeld ------------------ These animations are largely made using manim, a scrappy open-source python library: https://github.com/3b1b/manim If you want to check it out, I feel compelled to warn you that it's not the most well-documented tool, and it has many other quirks you might expect in a library someone wrote with only their own use in mind. Music by Vincent Rubinetti. Download the music on Bandcamp: https://vincerubinetti.bandcamp.com/album/the-music-of-3blue1brown Stream the music on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1dVyjwS8FBqXhRunaG5W5u If you want to contribute translated subtitles or to help review those that have already been made by others and need approval, you can click the gear icon in the video and go to subtitles/cc, then "add subtitles/cc". I really appreciate those who do this, as it helps make the lessons accessible to more people. ------------------ 3blue1brown is a channel about animating math, in all senses of the word animate. And you know the drill with YouTube, if you want to stay posted on new videos, subscribe: http://3b1b.co/subscribe Various social media stuffs: Website: https://www.3blue1brown.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/3blue1brown Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/3blue1brown Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/3blue1brown_animations/ Patreon: https://patreon.com/3blue1brown Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/3blue1brown 0:00 - High-level idea 2:23 - The details 9:12 - Limit to a smooth surface 11:20 - The second proof 15:15 - A more general shadow fact.
Pi is IRRATIONAL: animation of a gorgeous proof
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Pi is IRRATIONAL: animation of a gorgeous proof

NEW (Christmas 2019). Two ways to support Mathologer Mathologer Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mathologer Mathologer PayPal: paypal.me/mathologer (see the Patreon page for details) This video is my best shot at animating and explaining my favourite proof that pi is irrational. It is due to the Swiss mathematician Johann Lambert who published it over 250 years ago. The original write-up by Lambert is 58 pages long and definitely not for the faint of heart (http://www.kuttaka.org/~JHL/L1768b.pdf). On the other hand, among all the proofs of the irrationality of pi, Lambert's proof is probably the most "natural" one, the one that's easiest to motivate and explain, and one that's ideally suited for the sort of animations that I do. Anyway it's been an absolute killer to put this video together and overall this is probably the most ambitious topic I've tackled so far. I really hope that a lot of you will get something out of it. If you do please let me know :) Also, as usual, please consider contributing subtitles in your native language (English and Russian are under control, but everything else goes). One of the best short versions of Lambert's proof is contained in the book Autour du nombre pi by Jean-Pierre Lafon and Pierre Eymard. In particular, in it the authors calculate an explicit formula for the n-th partial fraction of Lambert's tan x formula; here is a scan with some highlighting by me: http://www.qedcat.com/misc/chopped.png Have a close look and you'll see that as n goes to infinity all the highlighted terms approach 1. What's left are the Maclaurin series for sin x on top and that for cos x at the bottom and this then goes a long way towards showing that those partial fractions really tend to tan x. There is a good summary of other proofs for the irrationality of pi on this wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_π_is_irrational Today's main t-shirt I got from from Zazzle: https://www.zazzle.com.au/25_dec_31_oct_t_shirt-235809979886007646 (there are lots of places that sell "HO cubed" t-shirts) lf you liked this video maybe also consider checking out some of my other videos on irrational and transcendental numbers and on continued fractions and other infinite expressions. The video on continued fractions that I refer to in this video is my video on the most irrational number: https://youtu.be/CaasbfdJdJg Special thanks to my friend Marty Ross for lots of feedback on the slideshow and some good-humoured heckling while we were recording the video. Thank you also to Danil Dimitriev for his ongoing Russian support of this channel. Merry Christmas!
Why is pi here?  And why is it squared?  A geometric answer to the Basel problem
17:08

Why is pi here? And why is it squared? A geometric answer to the Basel problem

A most beautiful proof of the Basel problem, using light. Help fund future projects: https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown An equally valuable form of support is to simply share some of the videos. Special thanks to these supporters: http://3b1b.co/basel-thanks This video was sponsored by Brilliant: https://brilliant.org/3b1b Brilliant's principles list that I referenced: https://brilliant.org/principles/ Get early access and more through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown The content here was based on a paper by Johan Wästlund http://www.math.chalmers.se/~wastlund/Cosmic.pdf Check out Mathologer's video on the many cousins of the Pythagorean theorem: https://youtu.be/p-0SOWbzUYI On the topic of Mathologer, he also has a nice video about the Basel problem: https://youtu.be/yPl64xi_ZZA A simple Geogebra to play around with the Inverse Pythagorean Theorem argument shown here. https://ggbm.at/yPExUf7b Some of you may be concerned about the final step here where we said the circle approaches a line. What about all the lighthouses on the far end? Well, a more careful calculation will show that the contributions from those lights become more negligible. In fact, the contributions from almost all lights become negligible. For the ambitious among you, see this paper for full details. If you want to contribute translated subtitles or to help review those that have already been made by others and need approval, you can click the gear icon in the video and go to subtitles/cc, then "add subtitles/cc". I really appreciate those who do this, as it helps make the lessons accessible to more people. Music by Vincent Rubinetti: https://vincerubinetti.bandcamp.com/album/the-music-of-3blue1brown Thanks to these viewers for their contributions to translations Hebrew: Omer Tuchfeld ------------------ 3blue1brown is a channel about animating math, in all senses of the word animate. And you know the drill with YouTube, if you want to stay posted on new videos, subscribe, and click the bell to receive notifications (if you're into that). If you are new to this channel and want to see more, a good place to start is this playlist: http://3b1b.co/recommended Various social media stuffs: Website: https://www.3blue1brown.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/3Blue1Brown Patreon: https://patreon.com/3blue1brown Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/3blue1brown Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Blue1Brown
Why do colliding blocks compute pi?
15:16

Why do colliding blocks compute pi?

Even prettier solution: https://youtu.be/brU5yLm9DZM Help fund future projects: https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown An equally valuable form of support is to simply share some of the videos. Special thanks to these supporters: http://3b1b.co/clacks-thanks Home page: https://www.3blue1brown.com Many of you shared solutions, attempts, and simulations with me this last week. I loved it! You all are the best. Here are just two of my favorites. By a channel STEM cell: https://youtu.be/ils7GZqp_iE By Doga Kurkcuoglu: http://bilimneguzellan.net/bouncing-cubes-and-%CF%80-3blue1brown/ And here's a lovely interactive built by GitHub user prajwalsouza after watching this video: https://prajwalsouza.github.io/Experiments/Colliding-Blocks.html NY Times blog post about this problem: https://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/pi/ The original paper by Gregory Galperin: https://www.maths.tcd.ie/~lebed/Galperin.%20Playing%20pool%20with%20pi.pdf For anyone curious about if the tan(x) ≈ x approximation, being off by only a cubic error term, is actually close enough not to affect the final count, take a look at sections 9 and 10 of Galperin's paper. In short, it could break if there were some point where among the first 2N digits of pi, the last N of them were all 9's. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but it quite hard to disprove. Although I found the approach shown in this video independently, after the fact I found that Gary Antonick, who wrote the Numberplay blog referenced above, was the first to solve it this way. In some ways, I think this is the most natural approach one might take given the problem statement, as corroborated by the fact that many solutions people sent my way in this last week had this flavor. The Galperin solution you will see in the next video, though, involves a wonderfully creative perspective. If you want to contribute translated subtitles or to help review those that have already been made by others and need approval, you can click the gear icon in the video and go to subtitles/cc, then "add subtitles/cc". I really appreciate those who do this, as it helps make the lessons accessible to more people. Music by Vincent Rubinetti. Download the music on Bandcamp: https://vincerubinetti.bandcamp.com/album/the-music-of-3blue1brown Stream the music on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1dVyjwS8FBqXhRunaG5W5u Timestamps 0:00 - Recap on the puzzle 1:10 - Using conservation laws 6:55 - Counting hops in our diagram 11:55 - Small angle approximations 13:04 - Summary Thanks to these viewers for their contributions to translations German: Greenst0ne Hebrew: Omer Tuchfeld ------------------ 3blue1brown is a channel about animating math, in all senses of the word animate. And you know the drill with YouTube, if you want to stay posted on new videos, subscribe: http://3b1b.co/subscribe Various social media stuffs: Website: https://www.3blue1brown.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/3blue1brown Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/3blue1brown Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/3blue1brown_animations/ Patreon: https://patreon.com/3blue1brown Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/3blue1brown
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