Smart videos for curious minds of all ages.
How high can you count on your fingers? It seems like a question with an obvious answer. After all, most of us have ten fingers — or to be more precise, eight fingers and two thumbs. This gives us a total of ten digits on our two hands, which we use to count to ten. But is that really as high as we can go?
Spoiler: You can count higher! Research mathematician James Tanton explains in this handy TED Ed video, with animation by Kaitlyn Carroll.
Related listening:
Self-taught baker Lauren Ko creates geometric pies and shares them on her popular Instagram account lokokitchen. In this Tasty video, she talks about what inspired her to start baking, how she learns new tricks, and h...
The ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is always the same: 3.14159... and on and on (literally!) forever. This irrational number, pi, has an infinite number of digits, so we'll never figure out its exac...
How do you make a hexaflexagon in under a minute from any long scrap of paper without scissors, tape, or glue? 'Mathemusician' Vi Hart is well-known for her love of hexaflexagons, hexagonal flat paper models that can ...
Learn how to calculate the day of the week for any date you can think of with this impressive mental trick and some practice. In this It's Okay to Be Smart video, Universal Calendar Puzzle, Joe Hanson demonstrates the...
Learn how drawing lines and counting can visually calculate multi-digit multiplication problems. This handy math trick, sometimes referred to as the Japanese Multiplication Trick, lets little kids, visual learners, an...
Archimedes once said “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth.” While the idea of a person moving such a huge mass on their own might sound impossible, chances are you’ve seen this idea in action at your ...
Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katrina, Maria, Sandy. Hurricanes have been major news stories in 2005 and 2012, and continue to be in 2017, starting in August when Harvey crossed the Caribbean and made landfall in Texas. What ca...
What do Euclid, 12-year-old Einstein, and American President James Garfield have in common? They all came up with elegant proofs for the famous Pythagorean theorem, one of the most fundamental rules of geometry and th...
Biruta Kresling is a Paris-based architect and independant researcher on folded structures—specifically how nature folds and unfolds tree leaves, tortoise shell bamboo, turbinate mollusk shells, the air sac of the h...
Engineer, maker, and 3D printing enthusiast Evan Stanford has created a 3D printed, hand-cranked mechanical laser show machine that 'draws' with projected light. The drawn shapes are created with two rotating cams tha...
