Vi Hart

This article is about the mathematics popularizer. For the California-born jazz singer, see Victoria Hart.

Vi Hart
Hart in 2012, sitting on top of a finished project
Born	Victoria Hart 1988 (age 36–37)
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	YouTube personality, educator, inventor
Known for	Mathematical/musical YouTube videos
YouTube information
Channel	Vihart
Years active	2009–present
Genres	Education Music
Subscribers	1.45 million[1]
Total views	154.67 million[1]
Creator Awards 100,000 subscribers 1,000,000 subscribers
Last updated: 14 October 2024

Victoria "Vi" Hart (/ˈvaɪ hɑːrt, ˈviː hɑːrt/;[2] born 1988)[3] is an American mathematician and YouTuber. They describe themself as a "recreational mathemusician" and are well-known for creating mathematical videos on YouTube[4][5][6] and popularizing mathematics.[7][8] Hart founded the virtual reality research group eleVR and has co-authored several research papers on computational geometry and the mathematics of paper folding.[9][10]

Together with another YouTube mathematics popularizer, Matt Parker, Hart won the 2018 Communications Award of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics for "entertaining, thought-provoking mathematics and music videos on YouTube that explain mathematical concepts through doodles".[11]

Early life and education

Hart is the child of mathematical sculptor George W. Hart, and received a degree in music at Stony Brook University.[4] Hart identifies as "gender agnostic";[12] in a video released in 2015, they spoke about their lack of gender identity—including lacking non-binary identities such as agender—and their attitude to gendered terms such as pronouns has evolved over time; as a teenager, they thought people who stated their gender were being "pretentious", but now they understand the importance to others (especially trans and genderqueer individuals) of how other people identify, even though they have no preference as to which pronouns they are called.[13]

Career

Hart's career as a mathematics popularizer began in 2010 with a video series about "doodling in math class". After these recreational mathematics videos—which introduced topics like fractal dimensions—grew popular, Hart was featured in The New York Times and on National Public Radio,[4][14] eventually gaining the support of the Khan Academy and making videos for it as its "Resident Mathemusician".[15][16] Many of Hart's videos combine mathematics and music, such as "Twelve tones", which Salon called "deliriously and delightfully profound".[17]

Together with Henry Segerman, Hart wrote "The Quaternion Group as a Symmetry Group", which was included in the anthology The Best Writing on Mathematics 2015.[18]

In 2014, Hart, Emily Eifler, and Andrea Hawksley founded the research group eleVR to research virtual reality (VR). The group created VR videos and also collaborated on educational computer games.[19][20][21][2][22] It created the game Hypernom, where the player has to eat part of 4 dimensional polytopes that are stereographically projected into 3D and viewed with a virtual reality headset.[23][24] In June, eleVR released an open source web video player that worked with the Oculus Rift.[25] In the same year Hart created the playable blog post Parable of the Polygons with Nicky Case. The game was based on economist Thomas Schelling's Dynamic Models of Segregation.[20][26] In May 2016, eleVR joined Y Combinator Research (YCR) as part of the Human Advancement Research Community (HARC) project[27], in which Hart was listed as a Principal Investigator.[28]

Hart is a Senior Research Project Manager at Microsoft.[29] As of 2021 they were a Director of Policy and Strategy in the Societal Resilience Group at Microsoft Research.[30]

References

1. "About Vihart". YouTube.
2. "FAQ". Vi Hart.com. Archived from the original on December 13, 2014. Retrieved December 12, 2014.
3. "Khan Academy's mathemusician Vi Hart brings dull lessons to life". Wired. Archived from the original on September 20, 2016. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
4. Chang, Kenneth (January 17, 2011), "Bending and Stretching Classroom Lessons to Make Math Inspire", The New York Times.
5. Bell, Melissa (December 17, 2010), "Making math magic: Vi Hart doodles her lessons", The Washington Post, archived from the original on May 28, 2012.
6. Krulwich, Robert (December 16, 2010), I Hate Math! (Not After This, You Won't), NPR
7. "Weird geometry: Art enters the hyperbolic realm". New Scientist. Retrieved January 4, 2023.
8. "Parable of the Polygons". Parable of the Polygons. Retrieved January 4, 2023.
9. Vi Hart at DBLP Bibliography Server . Retrieved March 29, 2014.
10. "Reshaping the Universe: VR Landscapes Explore Mind-Bending Geometry". Live Science. March 29, 2017.
11. "Vi Hart and Matt Parker to Receive 2018 JPBM Communications Awards", News, Events and Announcements, American Mathematical Society, December 8, 2017
12. Hart, Vi [@vihartvihart] (April 30, 2014). "Fun fact: I consider myself gender agnostic. "Person," not "Woman," please. I respect your religion, but don't like having it pushed on me" (Tweet). Archived from the original on March 5, 2016 – via Twitter.
13. Hart, Vi (June 8, 2015). On Gender (Online video). YouTube.
14. "I Hate Math! (Not After This, You Won't)". NPR.org. Retrieved November 12, 2016.
15. Khan Academy (January 3, 2012), Announcement, retrieved January 7, 2018
16. Gans, Joshua (January 24, 2012). "Learning on Speed". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved January 8, 2018.
17. Leonard, Andrew (June 28, 2013). "The mad genius of Vi Hart". Salon. Retrieved January 8, 2018.
18. Hart, Vi; Segerman, Henry (January 12, 2016). "The Quaternion Group as a Symmetry Group". In Pitici, Mircea (ed.). The Best Writing on Mathematics 2015. Princeton University Press. pp. 141–153. arXiv:1404.6596. Bibcode:2014arXiv1404.6596H. ISBN 9781400873371.
19. "About Us". eleVR. Retrieved December 12, 2014.
20. Case, Nicky; Hart, Vi. "Parable of the Polygons". Retrieved December 12, 2014.
21. Bhatia, Aatish (December 8, 2014). "Empirical Zeal How Small Biases Lead to a Divided World: An Interactive Exploration of Racial Segregation". Wired.
22. "Introducing eleVR – Vi Hart". vihart.com. Archived from the original on May 23, 2022. Retrieved November 28, 2017.
23. Lawson-Perfect, Christian (July 31, 2015). "Hypernom". The Aperiodical. Retrieved April 5, 2016.
24. Hart, Vi; Hawksley, Andrea; Segerman, Henry; Bosch, Marc ten (July 21, 2015). "Hypernom: Mapping VR Headset Orientation to S^3". Proceedings of Bridges 2015: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture. pp. 387–390. arXiv:1507.05707. Bibcode:2015arXiv150705707H.
25. "eleVR: the first web video player for virtual reality".
26. Farokhmanesh, Megan (December 11, 2014). "A visual guide to bias, as explained by adorable shapes". Polygon.
27. "eleVR leaving YCR – elevr". elevr.com.
28. Altman, Sam (May 11, 2016). "HARC". Y Combinator Blog. Retrieved June 20, 2016.
29. Allen, Danielle (April 21, 2020). "Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience" (PDF). Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Harvard University. Retrieved April 21, 2020.
30. "Opening remarks: Tech for resilient communities". Microsoft. October 20, 2021.

External links

• Vi Hart's channel on YouTube
• Vi Hart's second's channel on YouTube
• "Vi Hart". Khan Academy. Archived from the original on January 28, 2016.