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THE VIDEO SHELF · mathematical problem solving

1. A strange determinant

Timothy Gowers thinks aloud, in real time, as he tries to understand why Pascal's determinant equals 1. He does not fully solve it in this episode, but shows his exploratory process.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN commenters recommend it to see how a top mathematician approaches an unfamiliar problem through experiments and curiosity.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Timothy Gowers
Topic
mathematical problem solving
Format
lecture
Level
intermediate
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
4
Recommendation years in dataset
2022–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • I’ll add to this to give an example of someone who I feel is doing a great job of satisfying this very request in the field of mathematics: Timothy Gowers. His yt channel is an excellent resource of theoretical understanding through numerical methods. Here’s my …

    mungal on Hacker News · 2022-04
    In I stopped working on black hole information loss

  • But I do appreciate the comedy! Well while I have you, the message I feel I failed to adhere to in my comment was my interest in letting you, or others who follow their passion in math and programming, know that what you are doing …

    jrhvmt on Hacker News · 2024-04
    In Programming vs. Mathematical Curiosity

  • Unfortunately Gowers has taken Tao's lead on this one. Gowers has one of my favourite video series about how he approaches a problem he is unfamiliar with: [VIDEO] It is disheartening to see him jump into this GenAI puffery. I hope these GenAI labs are …

    missyougowers on Hacker News · 2026-05
    In An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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