Manimations

Introduction

Manim is a Math animations python library - originally designed by 3Blue1Brown and maintained by the manim community. The pretty visuals combined with my horrible writting pushed me to try out manim for a change.

First video

It was fairly hard to get started with manim due to reasons I will elaborate in the last section - so I wanted to work on something less ambituous and just publish it.

You can view the full video here :

Essentially, the main reason I wanted to use manim here is just for this animation:

So it is easy to see how the problem evolves over time. Nothing fancy here, I just wanted to get something done in manim

Second video

This is when I actually made proper use of going through the effort of making an animation.

There problem at hand is the isoperimetric property : to find the best possible area with a fixed arclength.

You can view the full video here :

Here, the main idea is the we can vary this angle (to increase the area) while keeping the arclength the same:

This idea is a bit hard to show with drawing figures - but it comes naturally when shown in a visual animation.

I was quite glad I could make this animation and explain this really nice argument by making use of manim.

Future videos?

Well, it’s a lot of effort :c

After working with manim, I personally find it a bit hard to work with. The documentation almost never has the answer to my question and many different versions along with not being so popular means you can’t find nice resources either. The discord community however is quite active and helpful and perhaps the only reason I was able to learn as much manim as I did.

Additionally, I also believe there are some easier ways to animate than using manim. Specifically, since I would now only use animations where I think it’s necessary or helps understand the concept better because otherwise it’s just too time taking for me to bother with.

So, probably not fully animated videos - but clips of animations where it helps explain.