Grant Sanderson
Also known as 3Blue1Brown
Grant Sanderson created 3Blue1Brown, a mathematics channel built around visual explanations. He began video and Manim animation projects during his Stanford studies, then worked on multivariable calculus lessons with Khan Academy. He focused on 3Blue1Brown full time from the end of 2016. His 2017 neural-network series used handwritten digits to explain layers, weights and backpropagation. The Summer of Math Exposition later encouraged other people to create mathematical lessons. In 2024, his transformer series explained attention and multilayer perceptrons with animation. Sanderson’s public AI work gives learners a way to see the mathematical operations inside modern models and follow them step by step.
- Now at
- 3Blue1Brown
Timeline
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During Stanford study
Joining mathematics with animation
Sanderson studied mathematics and computer science at Stanford.
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After graduation
Teaching with Khan Academy
He worked with Khan Academy on multivariable calculus lessons.
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July 2021
Encouraging mathematical explanation
Sanderson announced the Summer of Math Exposition.
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April 2024
Showing transformer attention
A lesson on attention explained how a transformer lets information from different parts of a sequence affect a token’s representation.
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August 2024
Explaining the transformer’s other layers
A later lesson examined multilayer perceptrons inside transformers and how these parts relate to factual information.
Sources and credits
Photo: Grant Sanderson / official profile; photographer not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: 3blue1brown.com. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.