If you’ve ever fallen down the YouTube rabbit hole of beautifully animated math videos, you’ve probably seen 3Blue1Brown. Created by Grant Sanderson, the channel has over seven million subscribers and is known for transforming advanced mathematics into visual stories: calculus, topology, neural networks, you name it.
When Sanderson went on paternity leave earlier this year, he invited guest creators to produce content for his channel. One of them was Ohio State alum Vilas Winstein (BS ’20, Math & Computer Science). His contribution — a video about phase transitions — has now reached hundreds of thousands of viewers. “In January, Grant emailed me and said, ‘I’m gonna be on paternity leave… I’d like you to make one of these guest videos,’” Vilas recalled. “I decided I wanted to make something about phase transitions, from the physics perspective.” The video explores why droplets form, how systems “freeze” into structure, and what it means for matter to change phase. It’s part physics, part probability, and part art. “You can explain what the model is in two minutes,” Vilas said. “Then you see there’s a phase transition and that’s very catching.”
Vilas didn’t just write and narrate the piece; he built the simulations himself. Using the animation engine Manim (originally created by 3Blue1Brown) and custom GPU programming in Metal and WebGL, he generated mesmerizing real-time visuals.
The collaboration also deepened his sense of how to reach a broad audience. “The audience on YouTube is very different from someone reading a math paper,” he said. “You have to do something to keep their attention. If you can make it understandable beyond the equations, that’s the most important part.”
The project reflects what has become Vilas’s signature style — rigorous, visual, and deeply human. On Spectral Collective, a YouTube channel he founded with collaborators Caio Alves and Aranka Hrušková in 2021, he creates videos that merge storytelling with simulation, spanning topics from graph limits to statistical mechanics. Those videos have earned honors in Grant Sanderson’s Summer of Math Exposition competitions and built an audience of more than half a million views.
Today, Vilas is a PhD candidate in mathematics at UC Berkeley, studying probability and statistical mechanics — subjects that, fittingly, deal with randomness and order. His research explores how local rules in random systems give rise to global patterns, much like the simulations in his videos.
Reflecting on his time at Ohio State, Vilas said what mattered most wasn’t any single class, but the community. “Definitely hang out with other math people,” he said. “That was the main thing I got out of OSU: the sense of community. We’d just be hanging out, and then talking about math. That made us all better.” For Vilas, the math — and the beauty — are both about connection.
Article contributed by Jim Fowler