‘Outside In’ makes a complex mathematical concept fun and accessible
This educational video comes from a strange and distant land: the 1990s. Based on the mathematical concept of sphere inversion should be incredibly boring. The graphics are rudimentary, the narrators are completely faceless, and again, the subject is incomprehensible mathematics. Nothing about this video should be convincing… and yet it has been viewed over 10 million times across countless YouTube uploads.
The credit goes to the creative team of The Geometry Center for making a video that makes the impossible possible: it makes math interesting. While I’d like to think the success of the video hinges on the MASTER ILLUSIONIST in the credits, I think the real stars are the voiceovers of Karen McNenny and Paul de Cordova. Their conversation about high-level geometry takes on a strangely spiritual tone, as if two gods were casually discussing the basics of the universe they created. At other times they are charmingly serious about how strange this all is. And sometimes they just joke about the little monorail models they made… with their mind.
The story is undoubtedly aided by a script that breaks down the confusing concept into easily digestible segments that pair perfectly with the grim yet charmingly retro CGI. In many ways, computer graphics are the perfect medium to represent mathematical concepts that cannot exist in the real world; the mind reels at the thought of mathematicians figuring out all things for computers existed. The much-discussed inversion of a sphere is truly mind-boggling, but even more incredible at the end of the video it will actually make sense!
Of course, there’s a possibility that you’ve seen this video before and are wondering why I’m ignoring how passive-aggressive the sibling narrators are throughout the video. With over 7 million views alone, Huggbees’ perfect parody of ‘Outside In’ provides the perfect complement to the original. Slowly ramping up the narrator’s cattiness until both throw full-blown tantrums, “Turning a Sphere Outside In” is both worth a watch and, hopefully, a parody so subtle that a high school math teacher almost certainly played it . accidentally in front of their class.