Make math videos! | Summer of Math Exposition announcement

A new contest called the “Summer of Math Exposition” is inviting people to publish fresh math explainers online—videos, blog posts, interactive games, or other formats—by August 22nd, with winners selected afterward for featuring in a 3Blue1Brown video and broader distribution via a playlist and website links. The core goal is simple but pointed: expand the amount of high-quality math explanation on the internet and lower the barrier for newcomers who have ideas but haven’t started making them. The prize is mainly visibility, not swag, though there’s a playful mention of custom “gold plushie pie creatures” as a possible extra.

Entries must be new work created between now and the deadline, not older projects being reposted. The subject matter can be “math in the broadest possible sense,” including physics or computer science as long as the explanation leans into the mathematical components—formulas, algorithmic complexity, and similar tools are encouraged rather than avoided. Beyond topic freedom, the contest explicitly rewards explanations that fill gaps: under-covered angles, better state-of-the-art teaching approaches, or more memorable ways to present standard material. Examples range from philosophical discussion of Conway’s freewheel theorem to using Kolmogorov complexity to talk about distributions of primes, as well as improved teaching methods for partial fraction decomposition or visualization approaches for trig identities.

Teachers and lecturers are singled out as especially valuable participants because classroom-tested explanations often remain offline. The pitch is that moving those lessons online could reach “one to two orders of magnitude” more people. A suggested path for busy educators is partnership: pair instructors’ learning instincts with students or others who have time and energy to produce online content.

The announcement then pivots into practical guidance for would-be explainer-makers who feel stuck at the starting line. The most repeated lesson from a new 3Blue1Brown podcast—built around conversations with people experienced in outreach—is that the universal advice is to start, even if the setup is messy and the first attempts are awkward. Early production choices often look unprofessional in hindsight: sound quality, editing tools, and even basic filming habits can be rough. The message is not perfectionism but momentum—press record, begin, and iterate.

For math explainers specifically, several content-first principles follow. Explanations should respect layers of abstraction, ideally moving from concrete examples to the abstract symbols and rules learners will manipulate. “Content is king” is treated as the dominant driver of quality: topic choice and freshness matter more than lighting, animation polish, or production effects, though production quality still matters enough to avoid unnecessary friction—especially audio clarity.

Finally, the guidance encourages creators to choose a genre that fits their strengths, whether it’s distanced “narrator on a hill” exposition requiring deep mastery, discovery-style narration that admits learning in real time, worked examples, or demo-driven inspiration. Definitions should feel motivated rather than arbitrary, and visuals should clarify the math rather than decorate it. The announcement also points to tools and communities—Manum for programmatic animations (and a more user-friendly fork by the Manum Community), plus shader experimentation via smoothstep.io—while emphasizing that simpler tools like PowerPoint or whiteboard-style animation can work when they serve understanding.

To support participants, a Discord space is set up for feedback and community engagement, with an explicit request for encouraging, constructive participation. The podcast launches with Alex Kontorovich and later features Sal Khan, with a broader intent: inspiration and practical insight for people trying to begin explaining math online.