Posted
January 3, 2014
She's
a recreational mathematician.
I
don't mean that she does math for recreation, although she might. I
mean she is a professional recreational mathematician!
Wh-wh-what?
Victoria
(Vi) Hart likes the kind of math that most kids don't even know is
math, and she likes to make really rad YouTube videos about marvelous
mathematical concepts. And she manages to make most of us who watch
her videos like at least HER kind of math, too!
Vi
Hart says that she went to a math conference with her dad when she
was 13 years old. Actually, it was a computational geometry
conference. And everyone was excited and passionate about the topic,
and Hart was hooked. She said that, at that conference, “It was so different from school, where you are surrounded by this drudgery and no one is excited about it. Any gathering of passionate people is fun, really no matter what they're doing.”
Hart
earned her college degree in music, not math, and she tried for a
while to start a career in the music field. However, when she found
some cool doodles she did while bored in one of her math classes and
created a YouTube video called “Doodling in Math Class,” she managed to sort of
catapult into an unusual career. People at parties sometimes asked
her, “What do you do?” And there isn't really a name for what she
does, so Hart made up the “recreational mathematician” title! 
With
more than 44 million video views – more than 5 million for her most
popular video! – with over 650,000 subscribers to her YouTube
channel, with more than 32,000 followers on Twitter and more than
34,000 fans on her Facebook page, maybe it seems as if Hart wouldn't
need to join forces with another biggie in the education world.
However, on this date in 2013, Hart announced that she was working
with and for Khan Academy,
the # 1 source for free online education.
Also
on this date:
Plan ahead:
Check
out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my boards for:
