Update: I Made a Full Video

I managed to submit a peek into the future of my articles to 3blue1brown’s #SoME2 competition. I also updated my profile picture.

As a brief summary, I’ve been producing fewer articles since the start of the summer to focus on making a video for 3blue1brown’s #SoME2 contest. I learned a lot during this process, so I might be able to make videos and articles more consistently. Also, I changed my profile picture to something that felt a little cooler.

The Profile Picture

Nothing much to explain here. I wanted an image that was a little more iconic for my social media accounts. I based it off a construction I made for an article in my series How to Discover Finite Fields While Bored in Class. I had to fix up some of the colors and add some effects, but it turned out nice. Part of the reason I’m writing this article is to make sure that people who follow me but don’t realize that I changed my profile picture recognize my face in the thumbnail.

The Video

Ever since I made a video for Veritasium’s 1-minute SciComm Contest, I’ve wanted to make full-length videos, especially after 3blue1brown announced the first Summer of Math Exposition Contest (i.e. the #SoME1 Contest) right after. While I was able to make a video for the Veritasium Contest, I was unable to make one for #SoME1, so I submitted an article I had written as a backup. When 3blue1brown announced the #SoME2, I decided to go all in.

I Kept Changing Projects

Like last time, a lot of unfortunate things happened. I wrote ~2 complete scripts that I had to abandon. The first script was going to be my series How to Discover Finite Fields While Bored in Class, but the video would have been at least an hour and a half. Even if I could somehow make the video in time, it would be hard to get people to watch such a long video without being an established content creator. I plan on making the video later when I have more subscribers, but I couldn’t submit it to the competition. The next script I wrote described how to use Hamiltonian Mechanics and Topology to find when certain…