How do you convince web developers—heck, people in general—to care about math? This was the challenge underlying Making Things With Maths, a talk I gave three years ago. I didn't know either, I just knew why I liked this stuff: demoscene, games, simulation, physics, VR, … It had little to do with what passed for mathematics in my own engineering education. There we were served only eyesore PowerPoints or handwritten overhead transparencies, with simplified graphs, abstract flowcharts and rote formulas, available on black and white photocopies.

Smart people who were supposed to teach us about technology seemed unable to teach us with technology. Fixing this felt like a huge challenge where I'd have to start from scratch. This is why the focus was entirely on showing rather than telling, and why MathBox 1 was born. It's how this stuff looks and feels in my head, and how I got my degree: by translating formulas into mental pictures, which I could replay and reason about on demand.

PowerPoint Syndrome

Initially I used MathBox like an embedded image or video: compact diagrams, each a point or two in a presentation. My style quickly shifted though. I kept on finding ways to transform from one visualization to another. Not for show, but to reveal the similarities and relationships underneath. MathBox encouraged me to animate things correctly, leveraging the actual models themselves, instead of doing a visual morph from A to B. Each animation became a continuous stream of valid examples, a quality both captivating and revealing.