Grant Sanderson

He graduated from Park City High School, Utah, in 2011.⁠[1]

He studied mathematics and computer science at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry and graduated in 2015.⁠[1]

He says the 3Blue1Brown videos and Manim, the animation engine behind them, began as side projects while he was finishing his studies at Stanford.⁠[2]

From 2015 to 2016 he was a Khan Academy content fellow, producing multivariable calculus videos and articles.⁠[1]

From the end of 2016 his main focus became 3Blue1Brown, which explains mathematics visually.⁠[2]

He recalled that the linear algebra series was a turning point: it was the first time he applied a visuals-first approach to actual course material, and the positive response led him to see the channel as an educational resource.⁠[3]

On January 7, 2020, he appeared on the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing what math aliens might have, whether math is discovered or invented, infinity and abstraction, the most beautiful idea in mathematics, and his video-making process.⁠[4]

In January 2020 he spoke at an event hosted by the Stanford Speakers Bureau, stressing emotion, wonder, and imagination in learning math; the channel then had about 2.4 million subscribers, and its most popular video explained a problem from the 1992 Putnam Competition.⁠[5]

On August 23, 2020, he returned for episode 118, discussing Richard FeynmanRichard FeynmanRichard Feynman (Richard Phillips Feynman, 1918–1988) was an American theoretical physicist who rebuilt quantum electrodynamics with the path-integral formulation and Feynman diagrams, for which he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. He took part in the Manhattan Project during World War II and then taught for decades at the California Institute of Technology, where his introductory physics course became The Feynman Lectures on Physics; in 1986, as a member of the presidential commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger accident, he used ice water to demonstrate that the O-ring lost its resilience at low temperature.Open the full entry, topology, intuition for exponential growth, online education during COVID, neural networks, GPT-3, and Manim.⁠[6]

In fall 2020 he co-taught MIT’s course 18.S191, Introduction to Computational Thinking, with Alan Edelman, David P. Sanders, James Schloss, and others.⁠[7]

The course used the Julia language to cover topics such as image processing, epidemic modeling, and climate modeling.⁠[1]

On July 16, 2021, the 3Blue1Brown website posted the announcement of the first Summer of Math Exposition (SoME1), with advice on creating math videos.⁠[8]

In 2023 he received the JPBM Communications Award; the citation called his YouTube channel “watchable and engaging,” covering topics from neural networks to information theory and presenting math as both useful and an art form.⁠[9]

In July 2023 Jane Street announced its sponsorship of SoME3, the third Summer of Math Exposition created by him and James Schloss, a contest to encourage fun and interesting math education videos.⁠[10]

In April 2024 he released an animated video explaining how the attention mechanism in transformers, the algorithm behind most large language models, works; the channel then had more than 6 million subscribers.⁠[11]

In 2025, while on paternity leave, he invited guest creators to make videos for 3Blue1Brown, including a video on phase transitions by Vilas Winstein; the channel then had over seven million subscribers.⁠[12]

In 2025 he gave a public lecture at the Stanford Mathematics Research Center titled “Who cares about high-dimensional spheres?”⁠[13]

As of October 2026 3Blue1Brown had team members for animation, operations, and music; he had also contributed visuals to the Emmy-winning documentary A Trip to Infinity.⁠[2]

Manim, the open-source Python animation library he wrote, is published on GitHub under the MIT license and had about 95.8k stars as of October 2026.⁠[14]

3Blue1Brown: Official website: https://www.3blue1brown.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

YouTube: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

X: Public account: https://x.com/3blue1brown (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

Khan Academy: Official website: https://www.khanacademy.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]