SoME3 begins!

Today we're kicking off the third Summer of Math Exposition, SoME3. It's an event to encourage more people to create online math explanations, with prizes and a chance to have your work surfaced to a larger audience. Learn more at https://some.3b1b.co 

You could make a video, a blog post, or whatever else you dream up, about essentially any topic you'd like, as long as it's loosely related to math. Whether you're a student, a teacher, or just a math enthusiast, as long as you have a lesson worth sharing, we encourage you to make something and submit it. The winner announcements from the last two years should give you a feel for the event. I also put together some advice in the first year’s kick-off video.

Prizes

Submissions are due August 18th, after which we have a process for selecting 5 winners to each receive $1,000 and a golden pi, along with 20 honorable mentions to receive $500 each. Winners and many of the honorable mentions will also be featured in a 3blue1brown video summarizing the event.

For the last two years that we've run this, we were pleasantly surprised by how the process for surfacing winners turned out to generate most of the exposure for the entries and really became the heart of the event. Even before announcing winners last year, just the video entries alone had collectively accumulated over 7 million views, with around 100 entries getting at least 10,000 views.

Peer review

The way this works is that after the submission deadline, we have a peer review session, where participants (and anyone else who wants to join) use a system that successively shows them two different entries and asks them to vote on which is best, according to a few criteria we lay out.

An underlying algorithm then uses these pairwise rankings to generate an ordered list of all entries. The ordering isn't perfect, but it doesn't have to be. It offers a manageable starting point for the in-house review that we do from there. I personally set aside about 2 weeks to give a close look at the top 100 on that list, then I pull in many other people from the math communication community to help select the final winners.

Originally we did the peer review just to make the in-house review a tractable task, but the pleasant surprise was that having a concentrated two-week period where a few thousand people were all looking at each other's work helped to jump-start viewership and exposure for many of the entries. Viewers of one entry on YouTube often had videos from another SoME creator recommended to them, even if it was a fresh or relatively new channel.

Also, many people gave feedback that the peer review was simply fun. It's a great way to discover new math content and new creators who you otherwise might not have stumbled across.

How to stay in touch

One way to stay engaged throughout the summer is via Discord, where you can find collaborators, share partial progress, and ask questions.

I'll also send out any relevant updates through the usual 3blue1brown outlets, like YouTube posts, Twitter, Patreon, etc.

Thanks

Many thanks to Frédéric Crozatier for putting together the website we’re using this year for the peer review, and to James Schloss, for helping to organize everything.