A 3-minute 3blue1brown parody video explaining math behind the basics of quantum computing.
When: June 2021
Time taken: ~30 hours over a week
Created with: Premiere Pro, Manim, After Effects
This was my submission to the Breakthrough Junior Challenge. It was heavily modelled off of 3blue1brown's video style - I created the visuals in this video primarily with Manim, the python library for visualizing math that Grant developed for his videos. The name comes from video series' such as theEssence of calculus and Essence of linear algebra.
I remember the awe I had felt first watching 3b1b's explanations, the visuals coming together to make the math make sense. The diagrams built the intuition behind why e^i*theta went around in a circle and the equations were only an afterthought, a symbolic formulation to capture the geometric beauty in a single line. I had struggled to self-study the math behind quantum computing, but after the link between the geometric and algebraic representations of quantum superpositions clicked, quantum mechanics felt so elegant. I wanted to create a video to spread the intuitive understanding of QC to other people, to recreate for others what 3b1b did for me.
I created this video with the intention of it being the first in a series, with later videos about bloch sphere visuals for various gate transformations (and their matrix multiplication counterparts), phase factors (how the 4d qubit comprised of 2 complex numbers is transformed into a 3d bloch pshere), and creating a variational quantum algorithm (like QAOA) from scratch (i.e. only numpy and scipy, no pyquil, cirq, qiskit, openfermion, orquestra, or any python package for QC). But as you can see, I never got around to creating them, and now I'm not so sure if that was a good idea.