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Making invisible understanding visible

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(Rough working notes, Recurse Center, April 2016. If you're hoping for polished work, you're in the wrong place.) Let me show you a wonderful visualization of the Fourier transform, done by Steven Wittens. Turn on your system sound, and take a moment to page through the visualization. A natural response to this visualization is to admire its beauty and the technical virtuosity involved (as of 2016) in implementing it in a web browser. But what's interesting about the visualization goes well beyond beauty and technical virtuosity. When I saw Wittens present this demo, my jaw dropped. I glanced across the room to my friend Chris Olah, and he was looking similarly awed. Talking later to Chris, we agreed that much of the impact of Wittens' demo was that he was vividly showing us aspects of the Fourier transform that we'd both long understood, but had never before seen made explicitly visible. When one begins learning about a mathematical object – say, the Fourier transform – one begins by

Making invisible understanding visible Making invisible understanding visible ( Rough working notes, Recurse Center , April 2016. If you're hoping for polished work, you're in the wrong place.) Let me show you a wonderful visualization of the Fourier transform, done by Steven Wittens . Turn on your system sound, and take a moment to page through the visualization. A natural response to this visualization is to admire its beauty and the technical virtuosity involved (as of 2016) in implementing it in a web browser. But what's interesting about the visualization goes well beyond beauty and techn

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