For the Love of Gifs

How many times have you been sitting in a classroom, trying to wrap your head around some unbelievably abstract concept, and no matter what the professor says or how many times the professor explains herself, you just know that you’re missing some essential piece of the puzzle. Then your professor sketches a basic picture on the blackboard and suddenly it clicks and there is a collective sigh of relief among you and your classmates.

There have been countless studies which show that multimedia enhances learning and can enrich a student’s understanding of a concept. For the most part, when talking about educational multimedia, only pictures, slideshows, and videos come to mind; but lets take a look at what gifs bring to the table.

Gifs, or the Graphics Interchange Format, are small animations or a quick, couple-second video that constantly repeat. They are commonly found cluttering up a article on Buzzfeed, or being shared on Facebook or Twitter, but there are some great math gifs roaming around on the internet.

Take this one for example:  A lot of people in high school learn how to use the trigonometric functions, but never fully understand where they come from. Seeing this gif becomes an “Aha!” moment for some people and they finally see why the unit circle is important and why trigonometric functions are periodic.

Or how about this one: We’ve all sat in a linear algebra class, been given this behemoth algorithm of calculations to perform for the Gram-Schmidt process and tried our best to memorize it. Doesn’t seeing it in action clear things up a little bit?

Remember line integrals?

Or how about Fourier Series?

(Speaking from experience, I took a whole class on Fourier Analysis, and it only ‘clicked’ after seeing these)

The great thing about gifs, is that they are short enough that they do not become boring, they will endlessly repeat until you understand, and are aesthetically pleasing. So, do yourself a favor and check out some math gifs. They don’t even have to be serious. Here are some of our favorites that are just fun to watch:

Nested Rotating Hypocycloids by Dan Craig via Wikimedia Commons

Inside-Out Torus                                                                  by Surot via Wikimedia Commons

Relationship between Radius and Radians by Lucas V. Barbosa via Wikimedia Commons

Construction of Hypotrochoid                            by Sam Derbyshire via Wikimedia Commons

Hyperboloid Constructed of Straight Lines by Cmapm via Wikimedia Commons

Homotopy between a Torus and a Mug        by Lucas V. Barbosa via Wikimedia Commons

Special thanks to Lucas V. Barbosa for creating all the public domain gifs in the main post. See more of his work here.

Do you have any good gifs of your own? Post them in the comments and we might add them to our list of favorites!