A truly competent mathematician with an exceptional sense of humor while presenting stuff! Never thought math could be fun during lectures, but I changed my mind now.
The experiment at around 2:21 is mind-blowing. We used to see these tricks played by some professionals on TV or during some events, but this is the first time I have seen one from a mathematical background.
What a wonderful lecture. Thank you for sharing. What a treat to be able to consume such high quality knowledge for free online.
Watching it I was thinking "I should go back to hn and say thanks to OP". Glad to see someone else did the same. Tokieda is so good!What a joy to watch.
The first time I watched this video I folded a strip of paper into a pentagon as demonstrated. What a surprise! The pentagon looked perfect. With a bit more effort, I next folded a heptagon that looked nearly as good. Haven’t gotten the Miura fold to work yet.
My definition of cool is something that changes how you see the world.
I will never look at a piece of paper the same way again.
And as an added bonus, the issue about asking questions and guessing is outstanding.
So I just spent the last hour while watching this attempting to get a python script with a menu to ask me size and shape for the tesselation then it spits out an SVG or PNG to print the patterns for folding the Miuri Ori lines (round, sq, rec, hex)
still fiddling with it.
I had GPT go learn tesselations from:
https://origami-resource-center.com/origami-tessellations/
to add them to the pattern maker...
Fun.
Another great lecture from Tadashi: https://youtu.be/pkfDYOZ1p4Y
This interview with him on his life and background is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/qrJCm10ajJw
Starting from just a sheet of paper, by folding, stacking, crumpling, sometimes tearing, Tadashi will explore a diversity of phenomena, from magic tricks and geometry through elasticity and the traditional Japanese art of origami to medical devices and an ‘h-principle’. Much of the show consists of table-top demonstrations, which you can try later with friends and family.
So, take a sheet of paper. . .
Tadashi Tokieda is a professor of mathematics at Stanford. He grew up as a painter in Japan, became a classical philologist (not to be confused with philosopher) in France and, having earned a PhD in pure mathematics from Princeton, has been an applied mathematician in England and the US; all in all, he has lived in eight countries so far. Tadashi is very active in mathematical outreach, notably with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
I hated maths in school, had to persevere all the way through my Electronic Engineering degree, and still didn't "like" it, until much later, many years later, when it was no longer academic, but pure interest.
I do wonder what a difference it would have made had I had teachers and lecturers half as interesting, humerous, and engaging as this.
I think this is a bit unfair. This is a fantastic talk but it is showing some selected highlights that the speaker is passionate about. To get to that point he must have learned math in some (presumably traditional) way, including parts that must have seemed tedious.
This is like listening to Mozart play some playful piece and saying "if only learning piano would have been this much fun" -- there is no shortcut to putting in the time and work to learning the foundations.
I see your point, and perhaps some of the reason is that I enjoy applied mathematics more than some of the more general/theoretical stuff.
That said, I don't think what I said (or at least what I meant) was unfair; IF maths could have been presented more like this I might have been more interested (and thus learned better/more).
Perhaps I just had more of the "dry" maths teachers, and my high school maths teacher was just a bully, so anything he had to say/teach was pretty much starting on a bad foot.
I have to apologize though, listening to another podcast with Tadashi, it turns out his mathematical education was as far from traditional as possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrJCm10ajJw
Thanks, I'll check it out!
hes a frequent contributor to numberphile!
https://www.youtube.com/@numberphile/search?query=tadashi
although honmestly most of their mathematicians are lovely people!
Tadashi is my favorite from numberphile. The way he presents information makes it so easy.
This is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkGawXjsltc
unexpected, but incredible !