This educational video comes from a strange and faraway land: the nineties. Based on the mathematical concept of sphere inversion, ought be incredibly boring. The graphics are rudimentary, the narrators completely anonymous, and, again, the topic is incomprehensible mathematics. Nothing in this video should be convincing… and yet it has racked up over 10 million views across numerous uploads on YouTube.
Credit goes to The Geometry Center's creative team for making a video that accomplishes the impossible: it makes math interesting. While I would love to think that the success of the video depends on the MASTER ILLUSIONIST in the credits, I think the real stars are the voiceovers provided by Karen McNenny and Paul de Cordova. Their conversational discussion of high-level geometry takes on a strangely spiritual tone, as if two gods were casually discussing the foundations of the universe they have created. At other times, they are 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 narrative is certainly aided by a script that breaks the confusing concept into easily digestible segments that are perfectly combined with the stark but charmingly retro CGI. In many ways, computer graphics are the perfect medium for displaying mathematical concepts that cannot actually exist in the real world; The mind spins at the thought of mathematicians discovering all things before Computers existed. The much-hyped inversion of a sphere is truly mind-blowing, but even more incredible at the end of the video. it will really make sense!
Of course, there's a chance you've seen this video before and are wondering why I'm ignoring how passive-aggressive the narrator siblings are throughout the video. With over 7 million views alone, the perfect parody of Huggbees’ “Outside In” is the perfect complement to the original. By slowly building up the narrator's malice until they both have full-blown tantrums, “Turning a Sphere Outside In” is worth a watch in its own right and is hopefully a subtle enough parody for a high school math teacher to he almost certainly interpreted it. for his class by accident.