Multimedia
About Our Videos
Writing the Song
Aaron thought of the idea for the original What You Know About Math? song one day on our lacrosse team’s travel bus while listening to the song “What You Know,” by popular rap artist T.I.
The math nerd that he is, Aaron jokingly started singing the song’s main refrain, “what you know about that?” as “what you know about math?” By the end of the bus ride Ethan had dubbed him T.I. 84, after the widely popular graphing calculator made by Texas Instruments (Later on, Aaron reciprocated – no math pun intended – naming Ethan “e”, after Euler’s number).
On impulse, we collaborated a few weeks later to write a full length Weird-Al inspired parody of the entire song, and, armed with plenty of mathy jokes and a high school career’s worth of math - from geometry to calculus - we wrote and rhymed our way to the song that has been played and imitated in classrooms and living rooms, both here in the States and abroad.
From Song to Video
Although we made several basement and car ride renditions of the “What You Know About Math?” our idea gathered dust for a few months until our friend Kathleen Fletcher asked to film the rap as a project for her broadcast journalism class.
After a few embarrassing afternoons of filming at our high school, Fayetteville-Manlius High, we called it a wrap – terrible rap pun definitely intended – and Kathleen spent a painstaking two weeks editing the footage, after which time the video was played on TV’s in our school’s classrooms following the morning announcements.
The kids at our school loved it, and soon after a friend posted the video on YouTube.
Rise to Popularity
In its first month online, “What You Know about Math” was viewed about 70,000 times – not bad for a video never intended to be shown outside of our high school – and on April 27th it became the top featured video on Youtube and was displayed on the site’s homepage. In its first three days as a feature, “What You Know About Math?”was viewed over 1.5 million times.
The video was also displayed on the homepage of Aol.com, between a clip of Jonny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and a video of Bon Jovi on his summer tour.
To date, What You Know About Math has been viewed well over 3,000,000 times, featured in Scholastic Math Magazine, played during an Internet culture special on the E channel, and featured on local radio stations and in local newspapers. But we’re most proud that our video has been shown in classrooms all over the U.S. and abroad.
We get emails and personal YouTube messages every week from teachers who used our video to remind their students that math can be fun and from students who loved it.
We hope that you enjoy(ed) watching the video as we did making it,
In the two years following the release of our first video we received hundreds of comments, e-mails and messages from people requesting a sequel. During the winter and spring of 2009 they picked up in frequency, so we decided to create “What You Know About Math” Part 2. Enjoy!
Ethan and Aaron
Co-creators and stars of What You Know About Math?
