Manim – 3Blue1Brown's animation engine for explanatory math videos

I’ve recently moved back into academia. Inspired by 3b1b and horrified by the awful state of the (PowerPoint) notes that were given to the students of the modules I now coordinate, I’ve taken to rewriting them using Jupyter and copious amounts of Blender animations. I don’t see myself using these tools as I know blender very well and I’ve got a workflow. Equations can be exported from LaTeXit as SVG and imported into blender for manipulation and animation. The new…

Fwiw this absolutely works amazingly well with modern coding assistants. “I want a diagram of equation X morphing into Y” or similar is always a one shot success for me. Part of it is the simplistic syntax and the sheer amount of open source manim examples to train on but it’s a pretty great demonstration of ai coding agents time saving. Especially since the output video looking correct is all you care about here. Ie. I don’t actually care about…

For those interested in Manim, there's an actively developed fork called ManimCommunity[0] that is looking to make it even more powerful and developer friendly. https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim

Grant Sanderson (the guy behind 3Blue1Brown on YouTube), and by extension Manim, has done so much for increasing the accessibility of math and computer science. Like, it’s hard to over-state how enriching it is to have engaging animated visuals if you’re just the average schmuck trying to make it through an engineering undergrad at university. Seriously: Thanks to Grant, I was able to pick up my Quantum Mechanics textbook again and actually know what the fuck was going on.