About

The pictures on this site are drawn by code, in the spirit of M. C. Escher: tilings whose tiles bend into creatures, circle limits from hyperbolic geometry, cubes that flip as you look at them. They are our own, made from the same mathematics he loved.

Scientific Gems is a collection of small, surprising ideas from maths and science that you can play with. Each gem has a simulation you can run, a plain explanation, and a few problems to try. Each theme also has a video that walks through its gems.

Where the ideas come from

Many gems are inspired by articles in Kvantik, a monthly science magazine for curious children published in Moscow since 2012. Every gem names the article that inspired it. The explanations, code, pictures and videos here are written and made by us; the magazine's texts and illustrations belong to their authors and publisher.

How the videos are made

The animations in our videos are the same simulations you see on this site, rendered frame by frame. The narration is a synthetic voice generated with Kokoro, an open text-to-speech model. Scripts, research and animation are ours.