TEtekacs·Aug 25, 2026
It's really fun seeing Manim [1] used to illustrate a proof!
(See the video at the bottom)
[1]: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
In A new ceiling for Λ: the de Bruijn–Newman constant3b1b
manim
Python2016–2026
3b1b / manim
manim
Animation engine for explanatory math videos
64Distinct people
66Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
96.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Animation engine for explanatory math videos
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
3b1b uses a python library for creating those videos. https://github.com/3b1b/manim As far as a math educator/communicator, one of my favorite videos of his is the video on the…
bb88 used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- manimcommunity/manim · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year66 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-02-19 05:05:38 UTC to 2026-08-25 17:48:34 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 2 | 10 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 2 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
66 sourcesthere is at least one video, if not a series of videos, where he explains his process in detail, showing the coding process and everything. it is a collaboration with another person where, if i recall, he is teaching them.
i will see if i can find it.
edit: "How I animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim demo with Ben Sparks" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbu7Zu5X1zI
more on workflow: https://github.com/3b1b/videos?tab=readme-ov-file#workflow
code for videos: https://github.com/3b1b/videos
manim: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
manim community edition: https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/
In How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]I've been doing exactly this for ten years, keeping the bookmarks file in Git. I added 70 bookmarks today, which is more than average. But rather than just a "title" I have whatever seems like I might want to search for later, including if the link rots. So it's more of a summmary. With hashtags. In Markdown (though without newlines).
Each new day gets a header.
Here's Sunday, with blank lines added to get reasonable formatting on HN:
links from 02025-08-24:
https://archive.org/details/TheDesignOfSwitchingCircuits/pag... My childhood book on digital logic (including a little #electronics) as an #ebook. #hardware
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp sodium-arc and mercury-arc lamps are also HID lamps. #hardware
https://archive.org/details/ge-glow-lamp-manual-1966/page/n1... scan of GE’s glow-lamp manual for neon
Read the rest
lamps from 01966. #ebook #hardware #electronics #history
https://youtu.be/Nn5v59l2Xec?t=64 VEMAG brand double-screw extruder screw pump #mechanisms pumping M&Ms and ground meat. #video footage of the parts being washed.
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/aleksandro_arz_51_arz51.html very pretty old radio
https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat2141 "Superlenses" to overcome the diffraction limit, #optics #paper from 02008
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_length#Electrical_l... electrically long and short #antennas and loading coils and whatnot. #electronics #communications #radio
https://www.ornl.gov/publication/evaluation-power-fluidic-pu... #fluidics for pumping in #molten-salt #nuclear-reactors (just an abstract)
https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/in-defense-of-tech-trees trying to use "tech trees" to understand the #history of technological development
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction near-field #diffraction is "Fresnel diffraction" #optics
https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Lewis-PernFascis... Was #Perón a fascist? #fascism #history #PDF #paper #toread
https://lwn.net/Articles/1030818/ #Treacherous-Computing for “confidential VMs” #privacy despite #Linux #virtualization #toread
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950482 discussion of alternative ways to run graphical apps inside #Docker, including maybe drawing in a web browser
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991638 my post about how #Rust’s approach to handling #Unicode introduces unnecessary bugs into command-line programs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApL1EL2GMk #Frondizi speaks about #Perón. #history #Argentina #video
https://github.com/3b1b/manim Manim math #animation software for morphing equations and plots and stuff into each other, using FFmpeg, OpenGL, LaTeX, and Pango
https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/September-2020_NVM... in ZNS #zoned-storage a zone must be a power-of-2 number of LBAs, unlike in ZAC and ZBC #PDF #toread
https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/f2fs.html "f2fs" is the #Flash friendly #filesystem for #zoned-storage. “F2FS is a file system exploiting NAND flash memory-based storage devices, which is based on Log-structured File System (#LFS). The design has been focused on addressing the fundamental issues in LFS, which are snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead.”
———⁂———
Here's today, ten years ago, so you can see how my bookmarking style has developed:
links from 2015-08-28:
http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/article-j1a-swapforth.html A free-software #Forth operating system running on the J1a open-source CPU running on a Lattice #FPGA thanks to Project #IceStorm’s reverse engineering and the resulting free-software #synthesis and programming toolchain, running on the Lattice iCEstick evaluation board with 8K of RAM. #J1 #hardware
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRVaLUQUmA8&list=PLACB124F79... A 2009 #video lecture series on #mecheng manufacturing processes by “nptelhrd”, Prof. Inderdeep Singh at IIT Roorkee. Some problems with the audio, seems to be a bit clipped. However, the video is entirely a talking head and a bunch of PowerPoint slides, so the only way you would watch this video to learn about powder metallurgy instead of reading a book is if you are dyslexic or have a beard fetish. At least it doesn’t have shitty elevator music.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/ The USGS gives #pricing information on a variety of mineral #materials, including some historical stuff. #minerals
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/titanium/mc... #Titanium #pricing in the US has gone from US$9.62/kg in 2010 to US$11.20/kg in 2014. Nearby pages use dollars per pound, but the prices per kg show a sharp reduction from its peak of US$17.28 in 2005, but it had a low of US$6.50 in 2003, US$9.70 in 1995, and US$8.26 in 1992–3. This means that the FFC Cambridge Process is not in production yet.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5188/ A #PDF with a bunch of metal #materials #pricing for 1970–2010. Comprehensive, covers nearly all metals and some semimetals. Unfortunately at least some prices use folk units like pounds instead of SI.
http://rebeccasolnit.net/essay/a-rape-a-minute-a-thousand-co... Rebecca Solnit talks a bit about #rape and #intimate-partner-violence. #feminism
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/08/06/2015-184... The FCC is proposing to outlaw #free-software for wireless firmware.
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/emulate-an... Programmers competing to do Intel 8086 (subset) #emulation in different languages, including a C program in 348 lines.
———⁂———
Perhaps surprisingly, of those 8 links from ten years ago, only one has really linkrotted; unsurprisingly it's Solnit's essay. But it survives in the Archive. The titanum PDF redirects to the general titanium Mineral Commodities Summary page.
Emacs full-text search is surprisingly often effective at finding relevant information. Grep (or M-x occur, its moral equivalent) works even more often. F6 opens the URL in my browser. Emacs C-s can search those 12000 bookmarks faster than I can type.
At some point in the past I wrote a Chrome extension that would show me all the links for a given hashtag with their descriptions (formatted as Markdown), with the hashtags being links to other similar hashtag pages, and also let me bookmark pages from within the browser interface, but I don't know where it is now. It wouldn't work with Manifest v3 anyway.
Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos
434 points · Open discussionHave you tried ManimGL?
https://github.com/3b1b/manim/releases
Super awesome, and you can make it into an MCP for Cursor.
In Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting libraryvideo author is using 3b1b's manim (https://github.com/3b1b/manim).
wonderful presentation.
In Lambda Calculus in 383 Bytes (2022)Link to Manim: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
In How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]Manim – animation engine for explanatory math videos
1 points · Open discussionThere's manim [1] from YouTuber 3blue1brown. And while it doesn't work on the web, there is a port [2] that does, which runs on p5.js. If you want a bit more control, you can use a canvas animation library directly. A few popular ones are p5, GreenSock, and PixiJS--but there are so many others. For simpler animations and for the most control over the result, it's pretty rewarding to just use the built-in Canvas API [3] directly.
[1] https://github.com/3b1b/manim
[2] https://github.com/JazonJiao/Manim.js/
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/...
In An animated introduction to Fourier seriesThat is definitely one of the things he does better than most. He actually wrote his own custom animation library for math animations: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
In Visualizing Attention, a Transformer's Heart [video]Not quite what you're looking for, but worth pointing out that Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown has published the "framework" he uses for his math videos on GitHub.
https://github.com/3b1b/manim
In Where is Noether's principle in machine learning?3b1b uses a python library for creating those videos.
https://github.com/3b1b/manim
As far as a math educator/communicator, one of my favorite videos of his is the video on the monster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH0oCDa74tE
Also since we're talking about powerpoint here you should probably see this Matt Parker video about excel being used in ways it shouldn't maybe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I
In 3Blue1Brown Calculus Blog SeriesSomewhat related but focused on animated diagrams, Manim: https://github.com/3b1b/manim From 3Brown1Blue, used in their maths videos.
Also maybe Mathbox. https://github.com/unconed/mathbox From Steve Wittens / Acko.net. ( See also https://acko.net/blog/mathbox2/ )
In Ask HN: What's the state of the art for drawing math diagrams online?The video series made by 3Blue1Brown are fantastic. He crafts visual math videos using an animation engine he has developed to provide great explanations for understanding concepts more deeply. Beyond the technical, his presentation style and insight makes them very motivational to follow.
Series on linear algebra: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...
Animation engine: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
In Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?In case you're not aware, 3B1B has a Github repo for the engine he uses for the math animations so that others can use it to make similar things: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
There's also a loose group of people already doing the visual learners "explainers" thing over here: https://explorabl.es/ (you can scroll down for links to tools they use to make their explainers).
But yes, I also feel this is an important development and that this should be an ongoing way of teaching people things. Formal education has IMO stalled out around the printing press but there are massive opportunities on computers (and especially on globally networked computers) to take that a step further and leverage the capabilities of computers to make education even more engaging and information-dense.
In Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out by Andrej Karpathy [video]Showing the 15 most recent of 66 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.