Posted on September 9, 2016

Visualizing the “Beauty of Math” in 3 minutes

A very short blog where you can find the slides and video of the 3-minute elevator pitch I gave at the Reasons to conference in Brighton, UK on Wednesday September 7th 2016. And as a bonus some images of things that didn’t make it!

A preview of some of the slides that I talk about during my alloted 3 minutes

John, the organizer, will have to approve of your elevator pitch idea, but he;s pretty open-minded

The set-up at Reasons to is as follows: 20 speakers have 3 minutes each to speak about whatever they want. The audience later gets to vote and the top 3 can come back the next year to give full talks. To be honest, I applied just being happy that I could come since you get a free ticket if you’re a pitcher. But during the event you get into the vibe, meet winners of previous years and by the end you of course want to be in the top 3, if only to come back next year.

The storyline

Although I initially thought about showing some of my favorite personal projects in those 3 minutes, it sort of morphed into a mini talk about Visualizing the Beauty of Math after I had an idea of turning my Art in Pi static piece into an animated one. Then came the exoplanets, which I already had. And the spirographs, which I sort of had but expanded on during my investigation for the talk.

You can find the slides in a separate github repo, but be warned, it’s not mobile friendly. These are made as a presentation on 1920 x 1080 for Chrome. After the presentation is done I typically try my very best to get everything working in other browsers and devices. However, for this presentation that just wouldn’t work. There are too many things moving around on the screen (even when using canvas in some cases). But, please trust me, it’s worth the extra effort of switching to a decently sized screen 。◕‿◕。

I made many, many spirographs to see which were most interesting to put into my talk. Here are some versions of my spirograph investigations that didn’t make the final cut

A collection of spirographs that didn't make the 3-minute presentation

A video of the talk

A friend of mine also made a recording of the 3 minutes, which I didn’t know at the time, but I’m very happy that he did. So, in case you’re interested in what I had to say with about my (practically wordless) slides, you can view it here

Reasons to

It was a great conference! I was inspired by so many talks. Especially the “inspired sessions” in the evening by Stefan Sagmeister and Jared Tarbell were top notch. At many times I just wanted to drop everything and dive into whatever the speaker was talking about; typography, generative art, illustration, and more. I can definitely recommend you to come here next year if you are looking for inspiration and a good time!

A few photos taken during the conference - I especially liked the R on my badge (left) and the Mary Poppins like merry-go-round (middle)

See also