Skip to content
0:00 / 0:00

#high-dimensionalgeometry#spherepacking#manim

Thinking outside the 10-dimensional box

3Blue1Brown

8.7M subscribers • 42 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 6 people: 6 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2025.
  • Linked in the description3b1b/manim
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 9 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

3.1M views9 years ago6 recommendations

Computer scienceAI and machine learningMath for programmersMath for machine learning

An explanation of high-dimensional spheres and the counterintuitive ways they fit inside boxes as dimensions increase.

Visualizing high-dimensional spheres to understand a surprising puzzle. Help fund future projects: patreon.com/3blue1brown This video was sponsored by Brilliant: brilliant.org/3b1b An equally valuable form of support is to simply share some of the videos. Special thanks to these supporters: 3b1b.co/high-d-thanks Home page: 3blue1brown.com/ Podcast! benbenandblue.com/ Check out Ben Eater's channel: youtube.com/user/eaterbc ------------------ Animations largely made using manim, a scrappy open source python library. github.com/3b1b/manim If you want to check it out, I feel compelled to warn you that it's not the most well-documented tool, and it has many other quirks you might expect in a library someone wrote with only their own use in mind. Music by Vincent Rubinetti. Download the music on Bandcamp: vincerubinetti.bandcamp.com/album/the-music-of-3blue1brown Stream the music on Spotify: open.spotify.com/album/1dVyjwS8FBqXhRunaG5W5u If you want to contribute translated subtitles or to help review those that have already been made by others and need approval, you can click the gear icon in the video and go to subtitles/cc, then "add subtitles/cc". I really appreciate those who do this, as it helps make the lessons accessible to more people. ------------------ 3blue1brown is a channel about animating math, in all senses of the word animate. And you know the drill with YouTube, if you want to stay posted on new videos, subscribe, and click the bell to receive notifications (if you're into that). If you are new to this channel and want to see more, a good place to start is this playlist: 3b1b.co/recommended Various social media stuffs: Website: 3blue1brown.com Twitter: twitter.com/3Blue1Brown Patreon: patreon.com/3blue1brown Facebook: facebook.com/3blue1brown Reddit: reddit.com/r/3Blue1Brown

Why it's here

6 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended for building intuitive geometric understanding of high-dimensional spaces, which is useful for machine learning.

sillysaurus3on Hacker News • Recommends

On “What Is a Neural Network?”

A trick for visualizing higher dimensions: link to this video Only 383k subscribers. Hmm. Remember to subscribe, comment, and smash that like button. Real Engineering is another great channel. And of course Veritasium and Numberphile.

jedimasterton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Random Points on a Sphere”

Don't forget 3Blue1Brown's incredible video about visualizing higher dimensions1. He's getting to xkcd levels of "Of course there's a relevant video" 1: link to this video

kibwenon Hacker News • Recommends

On “New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source”

There's a great 3blue1brown video that demonstrates this unintuitive result in a relatively intuitive way: link to this video

gilbetronon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Counterintuitive Properties of High Dimensional Space”

Great article! I've been thinking about this on and off recently, as I wonder if we might be having intuitive issues when it comes to gradient descent optimization. 3 Blue,1 Brown had a video recently that kicked off my head scratching and is a great complement to your article: link to this video

jerfon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Geometry from Another Universe”

As you increase the dimensionality of a sphere, an ever-increasing proportion of the sphere is within epsilon of the surface. This 3Blue1Brown video addresses enough related stuff that the rest should become reasonably comprehensible: link to this video This particular result is tossed in as a side note around 23:25, so it's not addressed directly, but it'll help.

NeoTaron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture”

Three Blue, One Brown has a decent video which perhaps helps get a handle on how one can use higher-dimensional spaces, without needing to wrap you head around trying to envision a four-dimensional cube, or similar. link to this video

darkmightyon Hacker News • Mentions

On “What is backpropagation and what is it doing? [video]”

I would reiterate that simply because there are problems with naive visualization, we shouldn't discredit visual thinking. There are several key elements to effective visual thinking. The primary importance is to keep it grounded in proofs and theorems, so you know exactly what are your limitations. Often you can use a geometric argument on top of a few theorems and you get a very strong result intuitively, and then use this intuition with a tiny amount of algebra to prove it (which might take you forever to arrive from a purely algebraic perspective). Another key is that there are several ways of visualizing things. You can almost always transform a problem into an equivalent one that is ea…

wruzaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “A Visual, Intuitive Guide to Imaginary Numbers (2007)”

Yeah, I see now. “times i” is discrete 90 degree rotation itself, not just ‘i’, nor ‘b’. Thanks everyone for making that clear. This though shows that explanations via analogies or non-strict wording may confuse one rather than enlighten. I’m not good at math, but once understood to not search analogies or geometry in things. Instead it is better to “shut up and calculate”. Not sure if imagining something is required to manage it. It’s only our brain’s faulty quirk. link to this video

euW3EeBeon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Gradient descent visualization”

…ration of measure in general). Also, very roughly, high-dimensional objects have lots of corners, and these corners are also very sharp. I would guess that gradient descent would get stuck in these corners and have a hard time getting out. Some links related to this: - Spikey Spheres: link - Thinking outside the 10-dimensional box - 3blue1brown: link to this video - This is a fairly long talk about HMC, but it does talk about some problems that come up when sampling high-dimensional distributions: link…