Hello everyone. On 21 October 2024 my YouTube channels Insights into Mathematics and WIld Egg maths were hacked and the contents deleted. This is of course annoying, but rest assured that the gurus at YouTube will hopefully get around to reinstating things once I am able to explain things to them. In the meantime, I thank everyone for their patience. You can always read some of the blogs on this site ! 🙂
njwildberger: tangential thoughts
mathematical ruminations and more
njwildberger: tangential thoughts 
Good day Professor Wildberger,
Do you have any update on when your videos will be reinstated on YouTube? I apologize for my impatience in asking. I hope not to hear that it cannot be done. I greatly appreciated your approach in your Foundations series. I am hoping to watch the entire series someday.
Thank you,
Mary
I was so scared! foundations in mathematcis should be in a book form please!!
Absolutely. I am willing to help type these lectures. They are monumental.
It would be crushing if public access to this content is lost. It’s a fabulous resource and is a gift to the world of mathematics. The quality of explanation is astounding, but what makes this so powerful as an educational resource is the way in which very important and complex concepts are brought together. As a series focused on the history of mathematics, this material is so beautifully crafted, it’s difficult to see anyone producing something comparable (at least in my lifetime).
Please persist in your efforts to get YouTube to recover this. I’m sure you will have the support of many thousands of people – teachers and students!
Thanks I am working on it and Incan guarantee that one way or the other this content will still be accessible. Thx for your patience. And happily my other channel Wild Egg Maths has been restored!
Please come back Youtube, professor~ It’s shocking when I realized something weird in this morning that it’s been a while not seeing professor’s updates on Youtube, meanwhile, also a good lesson for me to cherish the resource i have had.
Good Day, Professor,
Kind regards from China.
Your big fan!!! 😛
Dear professor, all the best wishes and good luck to the work on restoring your channel on Youtube. You made such precious and insightful teaching videos, it’s really sad to see them not there all of sudden in this morning~~ Terrible!
Kind regards from China,
Your big fan :))))))))))))))
When I discovered the content missing my heart sank. It felt like the library of Alexandria was destroyed. But my strongest feeling was appreciation and gratefulness. I felt so lucky that you shared your work in the first place and I got to see it while it existed like a masterpiece in the sand washed by an inevitable wave. The world is an amazing place. I’m sure someday that wave will come but hopefully it is a long time in the future, like 1 million years or more would be great.
Sometimes it takes a loss of something important to realize how important it is. Your ideas have had a deep and profound impact on my life because mathematics touches the foundation of philosophy, physics, and literally everything.
I’d also like to give a big thanks to the hackers for the reminder to take a pause every once in a while to look around and notice what is important.
I’m relieved everything is coming back and I hope life is good for you too.
Hi, was really upset to see your set theory as a basis to all maths video gone. Please make it return
Don’t worry, one way or the other we will be back. Might take a bit of time
Don’t know if this was a premeditated attack from anyone related to the “mainstream” mathematics. Although I don’t want to be so negative, I still feel that it may not be simple as it seems.
It was not such an attack.
I just noticed this evening that the videos are gone when accidentally clicking the wrong bookmark in my browser. This made me want to take a moment to appreciate your lectures and thank you for sharing them with the world. Here’s hoping everything gets sorted out!
Truely a great course, clearly seen by the number of people asking about it. Thanks for all your work for the Mathematics community 😀
Your videos are such a valuable resource. I had taken some time away from them and jus this week decided to re-engage on the Math Foundations series, landing here with this news! So very sorry to see this. I hope things clear up soon, and not just for me, but for everyone who benefits from access. They’re an amazing complement to your book.
Dear Prof. Norman Wildberger,
Hopefully you have saved all of your recorded lectures on a hard drive or on several USB sticks, and not just Youtube. Maybe if Google/Youtube is able to recover and make them available again, you’ll upload them with the help of volunteers and your supporting community on various other platforms as well. And please ask your members and subscribers to save your lectures on their hard drives also.
You could maybe release a DVD-series (or even pendrive release) with all your lectures or make them available for downloads for everyone’s benefit. The more people can save them, the much harder it will be for hackers to destroy such wonderful content.
A book format, e-book, and printed book, transcribing all your lectures would be much appreciated and supported also, if and when released.
Thank you.
Thanks for the nice comment and important suggestions
I am so looking forward to getting your great stuff back up. Your approach is so valuable to computing, to understanding, to others who like to learn stuff from scratch. You have developed a definitive word on some conjectures. Your demostrations and powerful insights are greatly missed. We are able to take off so easily from your explications into further inquiries that are so pleasing. Many things have been aaround a long time, but it is you who have made them understandable.
Thank you so much! I am hopeful. And in any case if YouTube is not able to resuscitate the videos, I will end up posting them on some other platform.
Hello I have some of the YTB playlists downloaded, differential geometry, algebraic topology, calculus one, famous math problems, history, sociology and linear algebra all in 720p. If ever needed for the restoration I would be very happy to provide said videos.
Hello,
I have some of the YTB playlists downloaded, differential geometry, algebraic topology, calculus one, famous math problems, history, sociology and linear algebra all in 720p. If ever needed for the restoration I would be very happy to provide said videos.
Thanks, I do have almost all of them stored — somewhere or other! But happily the videos since 2014 are now back on YT.
Hello Professor Wildberger,
Please note that there is a free alternative video publishing platform to YouTube called Odysee.com, based on blockchain technology and designed to ensure resilient data persistence over time, resistant to censorship.
This platform is ideal for creating a publicly accessible backup of all your YouTube videos.
Odysee offers a feature available upon registration that allows you to clone your entire YouTube channel with just one click. It will also automatically add all your future YouTube publications.
Many YouTubers use it to archive their YouTube videos. This is, for example, the case for the famous science YouTuber Dr. Brian Keating:
https://www.youtube.com/@DrBrianKeating
https://odysee.com/@DrBrianKeating
Or the famous graphical mathematics YouTuber 3Blue1Brown :
https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown
https://odysee.com/@3Blue1Brown
I suggest you clone your Youtube channels there as soon as you recover the lost videos.
Thanks for that excellent suggestion. I am also planning on a new website on Rational Mathematics which will also provide an alternate place for the videos.
looks like the Insights into Mathematics channel is back online. I’m so grateful
Professor Wildberger,
After I notices on Dec 11th that you all your videos were restored. I noticed that the Playlists, at least the Math Foundations Playlist, is only partially restored. Is YouTube working on restoring those?
If not I would like to volunteer to help you in the recreation of your playlists. I notice in my own Playlists there is a Collaborate function that allows me to assign others to be able to add videos to my Playlists.
If you are interested in taking advantage of my offer let me know. I understand you might be hesitant to trust a stranger with this after what happened, but perhaps we can figure out a way to build that trust.
Michael Shea
Wow! I saw the channel disappear, and wanted to see if you were doing well till I stumbled on this post. I’m happy to know it was “just” hacking and that it seems to be reversible.
By the way, I know very little about content creation, but I did notice that some universities (like MIT) and professors upload copies of their youtube lectures to archive.org as a “backup”. It’s an open platform (anyone can upload and download content, as long as it has value and copyright allows it). If youtube gets hacked or goes out of business at some point, archive.org would preserve a copy. Just a thought!
Thanks for the good suggestion. I am happy to report that the gurus at YouTube were happily able to restore my videos! Yay! I am also working on a Rational Maths website that in the near future will be an alternate place for watching videos and discussing these new directions for mathematics.