HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Darts in Higher Dimensions (with 3blue1brown) - Numberphile Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Darts in Higher Dimensions (with 3blue1brown) - Numberphile

30 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this explainer1 month2021–2023 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Used as a friendly example of high-dimensional geometry showing up in a simple problem, and of ball volume shrinking inside a hypercube.

Numberphile talks with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown about a darts puzzle with a shrinking bullseye. Solving it takes the volumes of high-dimensional spheres, and the answer turns up Euler's number.

“There's a nice video about this from Numberphile and 3blue1brown” (HN, 2023)

1 recommendations · 3 citations · Explainers

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@jstx1 May 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Counterintuitive Properties of High Dimensional Space
You can and as the dimensions go up the volume of the inscribed ball as a percentage of the volume of the hypercube shrinks down a lot. There's a nice video about this from Numberphile and 3blue1brown - [this video]
Nice video on ball volume shrinking within a hypercube.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@jstx1 Sep 2021 Cites it
on HN thread A mathematician's guided tour through higher dimensions
Read more
I think it's easier to approach higher dimensions without talking about spatial dimensions at all. For example - Darts in Higher Dimensions, 3blue1brown and Numberphile - [this video] Or even more trivially, you can think of a table where every row is some entity and every column is some attribute associated to it. For example, make a spreadsheet where each row is a person and the columns are age, height, weight, salary, and years to retirement - then you can think of each person as a point in 5-d space. And some properties are intuitively obvious - for example as you keep adding more columns it becomes more difficult to find people who are similar to each other. It's a pretty accessible way to introduce high dimensions without talking about tessaracts.
Example of approaching higher dimensions without spatial intuition.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close