Show HN: MathGPT – Create math animations for any question
84 points by yannigk 5 days ago | 28 comments
Hi, we're MathGPT! MathGPT creates Khan-Academy-style animated math videos that intuitively explain complex concepts to students, helping them understand how to solve their problems step-by-step. We're currently serving over 2M users, processing 800M tokens / day and growing! If you try it out, we would appreciate feedback on how we can make the overall experience / video generation better! Email me at ygk2[at]cornell.edu.
  • freakynit 4 days ago |
    Holy cow this is insanely wonderful. Extremely beautiful explanation of concepts. The generated videos are like professionally hard-crafted. Great work!
    • j_bum 4 days ago |
      Any examples? I’ve tried several prompts and get errors each time the plotting begins
      • freakynit 3 days ago |
        I tried following:

        1. Eigenvalues and eigenvectors

        2. Principal component analysis

        3. Low rank matrices

  • jrussino 4 days ago |
    FYI for the input "Graph a cartoid and explain it" I get a correct definition and some interesting facts/properties (in spite of the fact that I mis-remembered the name of the object I had in mind; it should have been "cardioid"). But then it tries to provide a plot, and the plot has an error:

    ``` Error Please check your input: Undefined variable heta ```

    Looks like there's a "theta" that's being incorrectly truncated, or something to that effect.

    I refreshed a few times and found that I consistently saw this same error.

    • yannigk 4 days ago |
      I was able to replicate your error and pushed a fix, it should be working pretty reliably now for equations that include theta. Let me know if it works for you!
  • IndieCoder 4 days ago |
    Kudos for the UI, very nice to see the seamless integration of formulas, graphs and videos!
    • yannigk 4 days ago |
      Thank you!
  • zaptrem 4 days ago |
    We used it to make memes (single sentence prompts) and the results are hilarious

    How Jeb! Won the election: https://math-gpt.org/?video_id=b9e16dbd-cab6-44e3-a393-f255b...

    Mathematical proof AI is doomed: https://math-gpt.org/?video_id=c5745f99-b1d1-4c57-8a93-6fe3b...

    • jamilton 4 days ago |
      Surprisingly funny! AI is often unfunny when it tries to be funny, I wonder why this is better.
      • zaptrem 4 days ago |
        We wondered the same thing! I wonder which model they’re using.
    • malshe 4 days ago |
      Hilarious! This can potentially go viral
    • pixelsort 4 days ago |
      Ha! Okay, I laughed at "computational phrenology".
    • yannigk 4 days ago |
      Haha these are amazing! I love them!
  • bassrattle 4 days ago |
    As a test, I input a2b2. It interpretted that as a^2xb^2 which is fine but it kept pronouncing "A squared" as "a square" (more phonetically, "uh square")

    For a tool meant to enlighten, hearing "a square be square" was confusing.

  • murkle 4 days ago |
    Sorry, this one is really terrible (also I asked for no audio) https://math-gpt.org/?video_id=6f622c5b-ccf3-408f-9db1-56d63...
    • yannigk 4 days ago |
      Thank you for the feedback! Working on it!
  • vivzkestrel 4 days ago |
    it says .org in the domain. Is this a "for-profit" privately operated company or some experiment with GPT? did you guys build your own proprietary model or is it using some open source LLM model?
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4 days ago |
    Neat, but I think I'd like it better if you simplified it and dropped the focus on teaching students. What I'd prefer is a slightly smarter WolframAlpha that doesn't force me to learn their weird syntax. Let me ask my math question in English, you turn that into a formula and just give me the solution. I don't need the explanation.

    The video generation is overly ambitious. Some of them come out wonky and wrong.

  • pino999 4 days ago |
    I don't know, it is still chatgpt. I wouldn't let it near homework soon. I do enjoy the latex rendering.

    Anyway it can't even solve x mod 66 = 3 (answer: x = 3 + 66k, where k = 0, 1, ...)

    Somehow it thinks the answer is 32 and it comes with a huge blob of shit.

  • fph 4 days ago |
    Very neat! Can created content be reused freely by teachers? Do you require attribution? I am interested in tikz plots more than in videos, personally.
  • lagrange77 4 days ago |
    That's a really interesting application of LLMs and manim.

    My problem with it, as with LLMs in general, is that i can't fully trust it. This isn't a problem with topics you know well. But those 3b1b style tutorials are meant to build an understanding or mental model of a concept for people who don't know it well yet. I'm afraid that, if the output is (partially) wrong, watching such a video could be even harmful in understanding the concept, because your 'greenfield' brain may pick up pieces of it that made sense to it.

  • Alifatisk 3 days ago |
    I am so happy tools like these gets created and is available for free.

    When growing up, I had difficulty learning math and I wasn't able to ask my parents for help so much. That is when I found PhotoMath, it changed my life, it became my second teacher and it was for free! I don't think Google even owned it at the time.

    I remember being very scared of losing it one day. Luckily that never happened, but I will never forget how much these math tools helped me growing up.

  • mlukaszek 3 days ago |
    It's pretty good! It did quite well when asked a variant of "when do the trains meet" problem, although it used different values for speed than what I told it to use (and what it actually used in textual response: 120km/h and 20km/h in video vs 80km/h and 60km/h in the prompt and textual response).

    https://math-gpt.org/?video_id=a7489ec5-b06e-480a-96c4-27765...

    If it did the animations in 3Blue1Brown style, that would be cherry on the top! ;-)

    Edit: I did notice it uses Manim, it just doesn't have the same feeling

    • xenonite 3 days ago |
      Sadly the resulting calculation is wrong (190/140≠1.5)
      • mlukaszek 3 days ago |
        Haha I did not even register that as I expected 1.5 as the answer...
  • sprobertson 3 days ago |
    Very cool, how does it work? (even if just at a high level)
  • Jzush 2 days ago |
    I tried it on a simple problem and generated the video thinking I would get a video that would go through the steps of division. Instead it said "Let's take number XX and divide it by number YY using a calculator to get the result ZZ".

    I'm thinking, wait a tick, you're the calculator. Weren't you supposed to show your work? It's that literally the point?

    It's a funny utility but I'm not sure it's all that useful.