Matthen
blog.matthen.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Matt Henderson makes short animated gifs and diagrams explaining math, physics and geometry ideas.
What HN saysCommenters praise it for presenting math topics clearly with illustrations, and say a gif can explain in seconds what paragraphs of text do poorly.
18HN people shared it
7linked it in comments
18stories submitted
133story points
3 years agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Drawings with Math6 people · 7 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 2Visualizing the Fourier Transform4 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 3How a series of waves with increasing frequencies adds up to give a square wave2 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 4If a mathematician wants to cross a road1 people · 92 points · first shared 2013 · 34 comments on HN
- 5Euler's Disk: spinning infinitely fast in finite time.1 people · 7 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 6Draw some random points...1 people · 5 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 7A diagram showing the family tree of Indo-European languages1 people · 4 points · first shared 2011 · 2 comments on HN
- 8Pick a Number Between 1 and 991 people · 3 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Sharing secrets: In case of attack from aliens, there is a big red button ...1 people · 3 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 10Geneva drive: Converting circular motion to intermittent rotation1 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 11Recursive Font1 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 12The scale of human spaceflight - an animation to give a sense of proportion1 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 13Iterated Function Systems (2011)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 14Clarissa - the computer program that pretends to be an astonaut1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 15Chaos: Animation of a double pendulum1 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
britta · 2013-10-15
My friend and I write a physics/art/geometry/math blog with gifs for illustrations: http://danielwalsh.tumblr.com/ - denser posts, but hopefully fun. (Here's also a list of posts, since they're so long that the blog can be hard to browse: http://danielwalsh.tumblr.com/tableofcontents )
I also recommend http://blog.matthen.com/ (tons of math gifs with source code) and http://visualizingmath.tumblr.com/ (lots of gifs and other images along these lines).
ElongatedMusket · 2023-06-04
Why write 5 paragraphs poorly explaining something that can be understood in 5 seconds with a gif?
https://blog.matthen.com/post/112212054651
Science journalism (at least the SEO-friendly sites I sometimes land on) are so low-effort it smooths my brain. Anyone able to recommend some really, really good interesting publishers/writers on all things science?
kbart · 2015-11-10
Matthen's blog is really good one, he presents various math subjects in a very clear and illustrated way. My personal favorite: http://blog.matthen.com/post/111638712111/how-a-series-of-waves-with-i…
jamessb · 2014-04-07
Lucas also has an interesting blog: http://1ucasvb.tumblr.com/
And Matt Henderson has some good animations too: http://blog.matthen.com/
082349872349872 · 2023-12-05
I appreciate the occasional analogue entry.
(also: https://blog.matthen.com/post/21277018974/it-can-be-hard-for-computers… )
ggonweb · 2014-10-24
Here is another visualized Fourier
http://blog.matthen.com/post/42112703604/the-smooth-motion-of-rotating…
hobb0001 · 2013-11-07
These rotating circles that are referenced by the article will forever remain a cautionary tale for me:
http://blog.matthen.com/post/42112703604/the-smooth-motion-of-rotating…
In pre-Copernican astronomy, where the Earth was considered the center of the cosmos, the erratic orbits of the other planets relative to us were explained away as epicycles within perfect circles. Later, closer examination of the orbits required modeling the orbits as epicycles within epicycles, exactly as depicted in the rotating circles above. In the end, it turned out that there aren't epicycles in the orbits, they were just creating a Fourier transform to explain the orbital paths. We now know that you can create a Fourier transform to generate any arbitrary path.
I sometimes wonder how many of our modern physics models, such as the standard model, differential geometry, and M-theory, are just highly sophisticated versions of the Fourier transform.