Frequently Asked Questions

Animations • Topic Requests • What does "3Blue1Brown" mean? • Translations • Licensing • Speaking • Sponsorships • Music • Recommended resources • Math question • Math results • Advice for creators

What do you use to animate your videos?

Almost all animations are made using a custom open-source Python library named Manim. Code for specific videos can be found in this repository. I made a video to demo the tool here.

I started the project concurrently with starting the channel, intending for it to be more of a scrappy playground of code for my own use cases than an explicitly outward-facing or professionally maintained tool. Since its inception, a community got together and created an alternate fork which is aimed at being more stable, better documented, and better tested. Anyone looking to get started with Manim should probably begin with the community version.

The version I use for 3b1b videos is perhaps best viewed as a testing ground where I try to quickly put new things together while developing new videos.

If you want to make your own animated math videos, I would encourage you to also take a look at the full landscape of tools available, such as Desmos, Geogebra and Mathematica. The main difference between manim and other math-visualizing tools is that it’s structured to build potentially long scenes for videos and to hopefully look smoother and prettier than, say, matplotlib.

Keep in mind that plenty of professional animation tools like Blender and After Effects can be made programmatic too. Also, be sure to ask yourself if what you’re doing benefits from being programmatic at all. If all you’re looking to do is simple moving/fading animations, using something simple like Keynote or PowerPoint might take you farther than you’d expect.

It’s wonderful to see others using manim, especially if it helps them explain math in ways that otherwise would have been hard. But every so often I see folks using it mainly to animate simple movements or to write and manipulate Latex expressions. In those cases (and I fully acknowledge the hypocrisy here) I can’t help but speculate that another tool might have made the job easier. I also get worried when I hear people ask things like “How do I sync up narration into manim?”. This is just a tool for spitting out the individual clips to be edited together later, you should certainly use traditional video-editing software for as much as you can.

Where programmatic animations work best is when you have a situation where the code directly reflects the math you’re trying to explain, or where iteration, abstraction, and conditionals make a set of illustrations possible which otherwise would have taken much too long to do manually.

Will you please make a video [some topic]?

Suggest a topic

What does the name 3blue1brown refer to?

I'll be the first to admit this is a little odd. The logo is a loose depiction of my right eye color. It has what's known as "sectoral heterochromia", meaning there are different colors in different sectors, which in my case looks like 3/4 blue and 1/4 brown.

In the same way that many channels simply share their name with the author, a younger me thought that a unique genetic signature might be neat. Plus, the channel is all about seeing math in certain ways, so it felt fitting. The name is just a reference to the logo, factoring in a desire for something deliberately weird-sounding that stands out.

Can I contribute/fix translations of the videos?

Contribute or fix subtitles

That would be wonderful, thank you! For subtitles, my friend Ben Eater built the website Criblate to make it easier for communities to contribute translations to YouTube channels they follow. There, you can review a translation, whose first pass was often machine generated. Once your edits are approved, it will be added as the official subtitles for that language on YouTube with attribution to you.

If you'd like to help with dubs on the channel, I am currently in the middle of a project to do this. Creating voice-overs always takes much more time than people expect, but if you have experience doing this and would like to apply to contribute, feel free to share a sample of your work with me via the general contact form.

Since YouTube is not available in China, there is a small team of volunteers that make them available on Bilibili with Chinese translations. You can find the means of contacting the team on that page if you want to help out.

You are not allowed to re-upload the content on your own channel, and such re-uploaded content will be taken down as a copyright violation. I know that might seem harsh, and that many re-uploaded dubbed videos are done in good faith trying to spread math around the world. However, there need to be consistent principles around how the lessons are put out under the channel name. To highlight one potential problem, there is otherwise no mechanism for preventing the insertion of unwanted promotional or sponsored additions, or other sorts of edits that misrepresent the original intent of a video.

Can I license these videos/Is it okay to use the material in my own work?

If you want to use some of the visuals offline for classroom usage or a presentation, feel free to do so. Under the standard YouTube license, you are free to embed the videos in your own site or blog, as long as it is not behind a paywall. In both cases, attribution is of course appreciated.

To re-upload the content in any way, for example if you represent an organization who wishes to use the content on an alternate platform, please fill out the form below.

If you wish to use short clips in your own video, depending on the duration we are often willing to offer a free license, as long as there is clear on-screen attribution. Please fill out this form for explicit permission, though.

Will you speak at our event?

You can fill out the form below to make a request. As a forewarning, I'm trying to keep talks to a mininum this year, so just know that I have to decline most requests coming in.

The channel no longer does brand integrations.

What's the music playing in your videos?

You can find it on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play. Almost all of it was written by Vince Rubinetti. The piano pieces used in the Linear Algebra and Calculus series, which Vince listed as “Grant’s etude” and “Grant’s Opus” on the album, are little snippets that I wrote.

For usage and licensing questions, see this form on Vince's site.

See this post for book recommendations, and this one for recommendations on other resources.

I'd like to ask you a question about math, or about one of your videos.

I wish I had the time to respond with thoughtful answers to all the people writing in with questions, but the unfortunate reality is that I don't. You can write in if you want, but you will likely have better luck asking on an active forum online somewhere.

If you are a Patreon supporter, and you ask a question about a new video after its early release there, I'll try my best to either answer in the Patreon comments or, better yet, to incorporate an answer to the question in the final version of the video before it goes out to the wider public, so that all viewers can benefit.

For general questions, it's worth noting that LLMs these days are really quite good with standard math topics. There are caveats, of course, and it's always a good idea to fact-check claims that are important or sound dubious. Nevertheless, I've noticed that quite a few questions people write in to ask about could be answered both quickly and effectively with most of the latest LLMs.

I believe I've solved a famous unsolved math problem/developed a novel idea. Will you check it for me?

Unfortunately, no. There are two important things to note here:

I am not a research mathematician, so am not the one to ask.
There is too little time as it is to read and learn all the things I’d like to read, so I have to draw certain boundaries on where that time goes.

I'd like to get get started making math videos online, do you have any advice?

When we kicked off the Summer of Math Exposition in 2021, I made a video centered around this question. Here are the main points I made there:

Just get started. Begin iterating and receiving feedback before overthinking it.
When explaining new topics, try putting concrete and specific ideas before general and abstract frameworks. This runs contrary to how most of us start explaining things that we already understand well.
Topic choice matters way more than production quality.
That said, get a good microphone and learn how to use it (an embarrassing number of 3blue1brown videos have terrible audio.)
Embrace niche topics, especially when getting started, rather than trying to cast the widest net you can.
Know your genre, and be wary of pattern matching from creators outside your genre. Some educational creators play the role of student documenting their own learning, others play the role of an expert conveying what they've spent years learning, others are teachers targeting students in school, others are journalists trying to summarize recent breakthroughs. All these (and more) have value, but they have different implications for pacing and style, so what works for one may not work for another.
In math especially, topic definitions should not be seen as a starting point, but an ending point.
Always ask what picture or visual you could use to elucidate a topic. It doesn't have to be fancy, and sometimes topics don't lend themselves to a visual, but it's always worth asking.
Using math animation software (like manim) can be useful when the topic at hand lends itself to a programmatic description, but I've seen many people overuse and abuse it, e.g. by just displaying a series of equations or text which are unnecessarily animated.

Various other videos I've made associated with the summer of math exposition also implicitly convey thoughts I have about the matter.