Patrick JMT is a prophet sent down to this planet by the gods of mathematics. His soothing voice is absolutely wonderful when it comes to explaining how an integral works or why Euler's formula is a thing. Of the hundreds of math tutorial videos that I've watched online, I always end up back on Patrick's website. His videos are far and away the best at explaining and visually expressing mathematical processes, complete with detailed examples that he solves along with you. I would recommend Patrick JMT over any other free online math tutorial service, even over the monopoly that is Khan Academy, and here's why.
Patrick JMT was a math professor at a local community college who decided to start uploading short, but detailed, math tutorial videos to YouTube in order to share his exceptional knowledge of mathematics with struggling students to help improve their grades. His channel took off, boasting almost half a million subscribers and tens of millions of video views, and he decided to quit his job as a professor to make math tutorial videos full time. He's recorded and uploaded over one thousand videos on a huge variety of topics on everything from basic arithmetic to discrete mathematics and linear algebra. His calculus videos are especially thorough and are definitely his most popular videos.
Patrick and his math tutorials all but got me through calculus in high school and I still find myself going back and watching his videos for math process reminders in upper-level math classes. What makes him so unique is that he spends the majority of his videos going over examples. He goes incredibly in depth, reminding the viewer of and explaining even the most basic processes in more complex problems, step by step. Math professors often assume that you remember all the processes that they use in their examples, which I find to be the greatest source of confusion. Naturally, this means that each example takes a long time for him to go over, which makes it even more helpful in the end. Not to mention you can pause and rewind the videos if need be. That is something that you obviously can't do to your professor in class.
Now Patrick needs our help. YouTube has recently experienced a revenue decrease and the educational section has been especially affected. He isn't earning a true income from YouTube and he's worried that he may have to get a job outside of making math tutorial videos once again, effectively diminishing the amount of time that he'll have to donate to making these videos. He very humbly highlights his recent financial issues and future plans in this video.
We should help him out. In the video, he highlights how he wants to revolutionize math tutoring by creating videos to help teachers teach math to students, alongside creating even more math videos in areas where he doesn't have as many topics such as statistics and probability. He also wants to journey into SAT and ACT prep. Additionally, he wants to create very basic math videos to help younger kids in elementary school to learn how to do math. While he wants to make videos for the sole purpose of helping those who struggle in math, and keep them free to encourage those who might not be able to afford a paywall to watch the videos economically, he's having trouble making a decent living. His solution is to ask for donations to help him make more content for people via Patreon.
On a very serious and personal note, Patrick JMT is the sole reason that I decided to continue on with, and get a degree in, mathematics in college. I was decent at math, but never a whiz, and I honestly didn't have a lot of courage when it came to math courses in high school. One day, while studying for pre-calculus, I stumbled across one of his videos. In the 10 minutes that it took to watch the lesson and a couple of the example problems I completely understood the topic that I had such a struggle with earlier. Patrick's videos gave me the background knowledge that I needed to go into tests and know what I was doing. That expanded into encouraging me to take the monster that is AP Calculus BC, where his videos saved me time and time again. Finally, here I am, taking 200 and 300 level math classes because this man's videos gave me the courage to take them. But I'm not the only one who he's helped and encouraged, countless others have been heavily influenced and assisted by his amazing math tutorial videos and I hope that he doesn't stop creating them anytime soon.
You can donate here. Thank you, Patrick, for your videos. I hope that you're able to continue to inspire people to learn mathematics. You're doing great work.
