‘Outside In’ makes a complex math concept fun and approachable
This educational video comes from a strange and distant land: the 1990s. Based on the mathematical concept of sphere inversion, it should be incredibly boring. The graphics are rudimentary, the narrators completely faceless, and again, the topic is incomprehensible math. Nothing about this video should be compelling… and yet it has amassed well over 10 million views across numerous uploads on YouTube.
Credit goes to the creative team at The Geometry Center for making a video that manages the impossible: It makes mathematics interesting. While I’d love to think the video’s success hinges on the MASTER ILLUSIONIST in the credits, I think the real stars are the voice-overs provided by Karen McNenny and Paul de Cordova. Their conversational discussion of high-level geometry takes on an oddly spiritual tone, as though two gods are casually discussing the fundamentals of the universe they’ve created. At other times, they’re charmingly earnest about how strange this all is. And sometimes they’re just joking about the little monorail models they’ve created… with their minds.
The narration is no doubt helped by a script that breaks down the confusing concept into easily digestible segments that are perfectly married to the stark but charmingly retro CGI. In many ways, computer graphics are the perfect medium to display mathematical concepts that can’t actually exist in the real world; the mind reels at the thought of mathematicians figuring out all the stuff before computers existed. The much-ballyhooed inversion of a sphere is genuinely mind-boggling, but even more incredibly, by the end of the video it will actually make sense!
Of course, there’s the 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 all on its own, Huggbees’ pitch-perfect parody of “Outside In” makes for the perfect companion to the original. By slowly ramping up the narrator’s cattiness until both have full-blown tantrums, “Turning a Sphere Outside In” is both worth a watch in its own right and, hopefully, a subtle enough parody that a high school math teacher has almost certainly played it for their class by accident.
