TikTok Update + Cauchy-Riemann
With zero experience in video content creation, I made my first three videos and posted them. A small step for humanity — but a huge one for me.
Surprising facts [for a non-TikTok-expert audience]
- Excellent view analytics
Imagine that during a seminar talk, someone told you exactly how many seconds the audience’s attention held on average, at what moment people tuned out, and what could be improved. I know there feedback from colleagues — but I’ve never received anything this quantified.
- The audience wants “humanness”
Each of the first two videos — on Chebyshev’s inequality and the maximum principle — took me exactly one weekend each. And brought absolutely miserable view counts. The Cauchy-Riemann video below (also not hugely popular tbh) took me three hours to make (which is short) but got several times more views.
The story of its creation (and micro-success ✌️): two Sundays in a row I was drawing streamlines, trying to make the fluid flow simultaneously beautiful and have the infinitesimal right angle to visualize an irrotational fluid. Then I gave up and posted it as is, because I couldn’t look at it anymore. Apparently, TikTok reads effort as advertising — and a hint (a plenty) of fatigue in the eyes as sincerity.
Well, now we know.
Cauchy-Riemann Equations
Although I’ve had three semesters of Complex Analysis as a student and two as a TA, I first heard about the hydrodynamic interpretation of the Cauchy-Riemann conditions in a Fluids course at Courant — and it was a pure wow moment. There’s also an incredibly beautiful derivation of the lift force on a wing via the Joukowski mapping, but I’ll post about that later.