This article was taken from the October 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Anyone logging on to Vi Hart's blog of quirky maths-related videos must feel they are far away from long, dull afternoons of trigonometry. "Maths is just cool," says the 24-year-old "mathemusician", a San Francisco Bay Area-resident who now works full-time for Khan Academy, the California-based online video-lecture resource. "But it's taught all wrong. What most people think maths is, is not what mathematicians think it is: algebra, arithmetic, multiplying things. I want to show people that maths is full of life."
Trained as a musician -- she has a degree in music and has never taken a college maths course -- Hart became fascinated by maths when she went to a mathematicians' conference with her father when she was 13. "Straight away," she says, "I wanted to speak and present papers at these conferences. At my first one I played a piece of music in which all the notes had been turned into binary numbers:
0 for a pause, 1 for sound. It felt like it contained a hidden code."
She started posting videos of "mathematical doodles" on YouTube in 2009 -- her channel now has 170,000 subscribers. Subjects include extraordinary uses of spirals, her own custom "angel-a-trons" and a critique of SpongeBob SquarePants' underwater pineapple home. She has also embarked on a series of speaking engagements designed to bring maths to life. "I would usually work out what I was going to say on the way there," she says, "so that I didn't get bored."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
