byThe best math YouTube channels are not interchangeable, and picking by subscriber count is how people end up watching the wrong one for months. A channel built to walk you through a homework problem at 11pm is doing a completely different job from one built to show you why a theorem is true, and a channel that teaches a fourteen-year-old fractions is doing a third. Watching the wrong kind is the most common reason people conclude that learning math from video does not work for them.
So this list is sorted by the job, not by size. Below you will find thirteen channels grouped into what they are actually good for: passing a course you are currently failing, getting through high school math, understanding why any of it is true, going beyond first-year university, and teaching a child who is still counting on their fingers.
One channel is worth naming before the rest. If you only subscribe to one, make it 3Blue1Brown. It will not help you finish tonight’s problem set, and that is the point: it changes what the symbols mean to you, and everything else gets easier afterwards.
All 13 Math YouTube Channels at a Glance
| Channel | Level | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| 3Blue1Brown | High school to graduate | Understanding why a result is true, through animation |
| Professor Leonard | University | Full lecture courses, start to finish |
| The Organic Chemistry Tutor | High school to early university | Worked examples for almost any topic you can name |
| PatrickJMT | High school to early university | Short, single-topic problem walkthroughs |
| blackpenredpen | Late high school to university | Calculus technique and hard integrals |
| Eddie Woo | High school | Real classroom teaching, filmed live |
| Mario’s Math Tutoring | High school | Curriculum-shaped tutoring, exam-focused |
| Mathantics | Primary to middle school | Foundations: fractions, decimals, early algebra |
| Numberphile | Any | Curiosity, and meeting working mathematicians |
| Stand-up Maths | Any | Recreational math and genuinely funny investigations |
| Mathologer | Confident high school upward | Real proofs, explained visually and honestly |
| Michael Penn | Undergraduate and competition | Problem solving beyond the standard curriculum |
| Math & Learning Videos 4 Kids | Young children | Early number sense for the under-tens |
Every channel here is free. None of them require an account, a trial, or a course purchase to be useful, which is the main argument for building a study routine around YouTube before you spend money on anything else.
If You Need to Pass a Course This Term
These four are the emergency room. You have an exam, you have a topic you do not understand, and you need it fixed today. What separates them is granularity: whether you need one worked example or the whole course re-taught.
Professor Leonard
- Precalculus through calculus III, differential equations, statistics
- Hour-plus lectures filmed in an actual classroom
- Never skips the middle algebra step that short tutorials skip
- Best for: rebuilding a course you have fallen behind in
Professor Leonard films his actual university lectures and posts them in full, in order, as complete courses. Precalculus, all three calculus semesters, differential equations, statistics. The videos run an hour or more each, which sounds like a drawback and is in fact the reason it works: he does not skip the algebra step in the middle that every short tutorial skips, and that skipped step is usually where you got lost.
Use this one when the problem is structural. If you can do the exercises but cannot say what a derivative is, or if you missed three weeks and the course moved on without you, watching a full lecture series in order rebuilds the foundation faster than patching individual topics does. If you only need to solve tonight’s question, this is too slow and one of the next three will serve you better.
The Organic Chemistry Tutor
- Millions of subscribers and thousands of worked examples
- Arithmetic through algebra, trigonometry, calculus and statistics
- Consistent format: state the problem, work it, move on
- Best for: finding your exact topic two days before an exam
Ignore the name. Despite it, this is one of the largest and most useful math tutorial libraries on the platform, running from basic arithmetic through algebra, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus, and statistics, alongside the chemistry and physics the channel is named for. It is measured in millions of subscribers and thousands of videos, and the odds that your specific topic is covered are very high.
The format is consistent to the point of being mechanical: state the problem, work it on screen, move to the next one. There is no personality to speak of and no attempt to make you love the subject. When you are two days from an exam, that is exactly what you want. The catch is that it teaches procedure well and intuition barely at all, so a term spent only here leaves you able to compute things you cannot explain.
PatrickJMT
- Comfortably over a million subscribers, built across a decade
- Most standard algebra and calculus problems have a video
- Clips run a few minutes, so it rewards searching over watching
- Best for: looking up one technique mid problem set
Patrick Jones has been posting short, single-topic math walkthroughs for well over a decade, and the library is deep enough that most standard algebra and calculus problems have a video. Comfortably over a million people subscribe, and the appeal has always been the same: no intro, no branding, no throat-clearing. The problem goes on the board and he solves it.
The clips are typically a few minutes long, which makes this the right channel for searching rather than watching. Look up the exact technique you are stuck on, watch one video, go back to your problem set. Because much of the library is older, the production is plain, but the mathematics does not age and neither do the explanations.
blackpenredpen
- An audience in the millions, built on difficult integrals
- Integration technique, limits and deliberately absurd challenges
- The second pen marks the step actually doing the work
- Best for: when routine problems are fine and hard ones are not
Steve Chow works through calculus problems with an energy the subject rarely gets, and the channel has built an audience in the millions on the back of hard integrals, limit problems, and the occasional deliberately absurd challenge. The two-pen convention the name refers to is a genuine teaching device: the second color marks the step that is actually doing the work, which is the step most students copy without noticing.
Reach for this when you can already do the routine problems and the hard ones are still beating you. It is strongest on integration technique, where the difference between a solvable and an unsolvable integral is usually one substitution you did not think to try, and watching someone else’s choice of substitution is a genuinely efficient way to build that instinct.
Video alone does not produce a grade. Whichever channel you pick from this group, work its examples with the video paused before the solution, then find more problems of the same type. A textbook exercise set is ideal, and the online math solvers guide covers tools that will check your working when nobody is around to.
If You Are in High School
School math has a specific problem that university math does not: the syllabus is fixed, the exam format is predictable, and you are usually being taught by someone with thirty other students to manage. The channels here are built by teachers who understand that constraint.
Eddie Woo
- A couple of million subscribers, filmed in a live classroom
- You hear the questions real students ask, including confused ones
- Follows the Australian senior secondary curriculum
- Best for: high schoolers who want to enjoy the subject
Eddie Woo is a working high school teacher in Sydney who films his real lessons, students and all. That format is the whole value. You hear the questions actual teenagers ask, including the confused ones, and you hear him answer them in the moment rather than in a scripted take. When your own confusion matches a question from the back of his classroom, the explanation lands differently than a polished tutorial does.
The channel has grown to a couple of million subscribers on the strength of his enthusiasm, which is unfeigned and slightly infectious. Coverage follows the Australian senior curriculum, so the topic ordering will not match your syllabus exactly, but the mathematics is the mathematics and calculus does not change nationality.
Mario’s Math Tutoring
- A few hundred thousand subscribers, and it deserves more
- Playlists organized like a course, with a standardized-test focus
- Calm pacing with none of the usual tutorial impatience
- Best for: students that fast, confident explainers leave behind
A few hundred thousand subscribers rather than millions, and that is worth noting only because the channel deserves more. Mario Bianchi organizes videos the way a course is organized, with clear playlists for algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and precalculus, and a steady focus on the kinds of questions that appear on standardized tests.
The tone is the differentiator. He teaches at the pace of a student who is genuinely stuck, without the slight impatience that creeps into a lot of tutorial content. If a fast, confident explainer has ever made you feel worse about a topic rather than better, start here instead.
Mathantics
- An audience in the millions, built by Rob and Jeremy
- Fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios and early algebra
- Simple animation and a great deal of patience
- Best for: algebra that keeps breaking where a fraction appears
Mathantics covers the material that comes before high school math, and it covers it better than almost anyone: fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, negative numbers, the beginnings of algebra. Rob and Jeremy have built an audience in the millions by explaining these clearly and without condescension, using simple animation and a lot of patience.
Here is the uncomfortable use case: a large share of students failing algebra are not failing algebra. They are failing fractions, inside an algebra problem. If solving equations keeps going wrong at the point where a fraction appears, spending a weekend on the Mathantics fractions playlist will do more for your grade than another month of algebra tutorials.
If You Want Math to Be Interesting Again
These four are not going to raise your grade this month, and none of them is trying to. They exist to answer the question that school rarely has time for, which is why any of this is worth knowing. For a lot of people this is the group that repairs a relationship with the subject that school damaged.
3Blue1Brown
- Several million subscribers, and deservedly the best known
- Essence of Linear Algebra and Essence of Calculus series
- Custom animation that shows the definition, not a picture of it
- Best for: understanding why a result is true, at any level
Grant Sanderson makes the best mathematical explanations currently available anywhere, in any medium, and the channel’s several million subscribers reflect that rather than any algorithm. He built his own animation library specifically to show mathematical objects moving, and the results are not decoration. When you watch a matrix transformation actually deform space, or watch the terms of a Fourier series assemble a shape, you are seeing the definition rather than a picture of it.
The Essence of Linear Algebra and Essence of Calculus series are the obvious starting points, and both are best watched before or alongside a course rather than instead of one. The channel gives you the meaning of the operations. It does not give you fluency in performing them, and it does not pretend to.
If you are working through a linear algebra course, watching Essence of Linear Algebra first and then opening one of the standard linear algebra books is a noticeably easier sequence than doing it the other way around.
Numberphile
- Several million subscribers, brown paper and a marker
- Number theory, primes, infinity and assorted curiosities
- Format essentially unchanged in over a decade because it works
- Best for: finding a topic you did not know existed
Brady Haran points a camera at working mathematicians and lets them talk about something they find beautiful, usually on brown paper with a marker. Several million people subscribe, and the format has barely changed in over a decade because it did not need to. The subjects range from genuinely famous problems to small oddities that exist only because someone was curious.
What Numberphile does that a lecture cannot is show you mathematicians as people who are visibly delighted by their own subject. For a student who has only ever met math as a graded obligation, that is a useful thing to see. It is also the best channel here for finding a topic you did not know existed, which is how a fair number of mathematicians chose their field.
Stand-up Maths
- Over a million subscribers watching spreadsheets pushed past reason
- Recreational math, puzzles and long-running silly investigations
- An honest thread on mathematical error, including his own
- Best for: proof that being wrong is normal, not disqualifying
Matt Parker is a former math teacher turned comedian, and the channel is exactly what that combination sounds like: over a million subscribers watching him spend three weeks building something absurd in a spreadsheet to answer a question nobody asked. The humour is real, and so is the mathematics under it.
The genuinely instructive thread is his running interest in mathematical error, including his own. Videos that walk through a mistake, why it happened, and how it was caught teach something most educational content refuses to: that being wrong is a normal part of doing mathematics rather than evidence that you are bad at it. If you would like more of that, the math puzzles collection is a good place to practise being wrong productively.
Mathologer
- About a million subscribers, run by a university mathematician
- Real proofs, with animation carrying what words handle badly
- Harder than Numberphile, gentler than a textbook treatment
- Best for: when popular math videos stop where it got interesting
Burkard Polster is a university mathematician who takes results that usually get waved at and proves them properly on camera, with animation carrying the parts that words handle badly. The channel sits about a million strong and occupies a genuinely useful gap: harder than Numberphile, more rigorous than most explainer content, and considerably more accessible than a textbook treatment of the same theorem.
This is the channel for the reader who keeps finding that popular math videos stop exactly where it was getting interesting. Mathologer keeps going. Expect to pause, rewind, and occasionally work something out on paper, which is the correct response rather than a failure.
If You Are Past First-Year University
Michael Penn
- A few hundred thousand, which is what advanced material earns
- Number theory, abstract algebra, analysis and olympiad problems
- Shows the approaches that fail, not only the clean solution
- Best for: undergraduates past the calculus sequence
Coverage thins out fast above the calculus sequence, which is why Michael Penn matters. He is a working mathematics professor posting problem-solving sessions at the level of competition mathematics and upper-division undergraduate courses: number theory, abstract algebra, real analysis, and a steady diet of olympiad-style problems worked in full.
The audience is a few hundred thousand, which is what happens when your subject matter is genuinely advanced, and the value is that he shows the search rather than only the solution. You watch him try an approach, find it does not work, and back out. That is what doing mathematics actually looks like, and it is almost entirely absent from polished educational video.
Pair it with reading. Watching proof technique is useful, but at this level the skill is built by writing proofs yourself, which is a habit the real analysis books and abstract algebra books guides are built around.
If You Are Teaching a Young Child
Math & Learning Videos 4 Kids
- Short colorful segments built for a short attention span
- Counting, place value, simple operations, shapes, time and money
- Made by a practising teacher rather than a studio
- Best for: under-tens, paired with something physical to do
Run by a teacher, this channel covers early number sense for primary-age children: counting, place value, simple operations, shapes, time and money, delivered in short colorful segments built for a short attention span. The audience is modest compared with the giants on this list, and for this age group that matters far less than pacing does.
One caution worth stating plainly for parents. At this age, video should be the smaller half of the activity. A child who watches a clip about place value and then physically groups ten objects has learned place value; a child who only watched the clip has watched a clip. Use these as the setup for something done with hands, and see the educational YouTube channels for kids roundup if you want options beyond mathematics.
How to Actually Learn From a Math Video
Watching math is close to the least efficient way to learn it, and this is the part most lists leave out. A video moves at the presenter’s pace and produces a strong feeling of comprehension, because following someone else’s reasoning is genuinely easy. That feeling is not the same as being able to reproduce the reasoning, and the gap between the two is where exam results come from.
What converts watching into learning:
- Pause before every solution. When the problem is stated, stop the video and try it. Two minutes of failing at it first changes what the explanation does, because now you are watching an answer to a question you actually have.
- Close the tab and redo it from memory. If you cannot reproduce the worked example on blank paper an hour later, you did not learn it, you recognized it. This is active recall, and it is the single highest-yield change most students can make.
- Never watch at 2x for new material. Speed is fine for review and actively harmful for a concept you have not met, because the comprehension is faked by the pace.
- Stop after one topic. Four hours of math video in one sitting produces almost nothing. One video plus thirty minutes of problems beats it comfortably.
- Write while you watch. Not transcription, which is useless here. Copy the working, and write down the step you would not have thought of, because that step is the actual content.
The note-taking methods guide covers formats that suit worked mathematics better than linear notes do, and if the problem is sitting down at all rather than what to do once you have, the Pomodoro technique is a reasonable place to start.
What YouTube Cannot Do for You
Three honest limits, because a list of thirteen math YouTube channels can imply that video is a complete solution and it is not.
- It cannot see your work. Video answers the questions its maker anticipated. It cannot look at the line where your reasoning went wrong and tell you why, and identifying your own specific error is most of what a tutor is for.
- It cannot supply problems that are graded. Every channel here shows solutions. None of them makes you produce one and tells you whether it holds up, which is the part that builds the skill.
- It has no idea what you already know. A course sequences material so each piece rests on the last. YouTube hands you whatever you searched for, which is why a term built only from video tends to leave odd gaps that surface later.
Use these channels as the explanation layer over a real problem source: a textbook, a course, a syllabus, a past-paper set. The math help websites and math apps and digital tools guides cover the practice-and-feedback half that video structurally cannot provide.
Which One Should You Actually Subscribe To
Subscribing to all thirteen math YouTube channels is how you end up watching none of them. Pick two: one from the group that matches your immediate problem, and 3Blue1Brown for the long game.
- Failing a university course: Professor Leonard, plus 3Blue1Brown.
- Stuck on one topic, exam this week: The Organic Chemistry Tutor or PatrickJMT.
- High school, want to actually enjoy it: Eddie Woo, plus Numberphile.
- Algebra keeps breaking at the fractions: Mathantics, before anything else.
- Calculus is fine, the hard problems are not: blackpenredpen, then Michael Penn.
- Not studying, just curious: Numberphile and Stand-up Maths, then Mathologer when you want more depth.
- Teaching a child under ten: Math & Learning Videos 4 Kids, with something physical to do afterwards.
Then do the unglamorous part. Watch one video, close it, and try the problem on paper without looking. The channels on this list are genuinely excellent, and none of them can do that step for you.
If you want the same treatment for the other sciences, there are companion roundups for physics YouTube channels, chemistry YouTube channels, and biology YouTube channels.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best math YouTube channel?
3Blue1Brown, for building genuine understanding of what mathematical operations mean. It is the strongest channel on this list by a clear margin, but it is deliberately not a homework channel. If you need to solve a specific problem tonight, The Organic Chemistry Tutor or PatrickJMT will serve you better, and if you need a whole course re-taught, Professor Leonard will.
Can I actually learn calculus from YouTube?
You can learn the concepts. Professor Leonard posts complete calculus lecture courses, and 3Blue1Brown’s Essence of Calculus builds the intuition behind them. What video cannot do is make you fluent, because fluency comes from solving problems and having your errors corrected. Treat the videos as the lecture half of a course and supply the problem sets yourself.
Which math YouTube channel is best for high school?
Eddie Woo, because he films real classroom lessons and you hear the questions other students ask. Mario’s Math Tutoring is the better pick if you want material organized to match a syllabus and a calmer pace. If algebra keeps going wrong specifically where fractions appear, go back to Mathantics first.
Which channel is best for advanced mathematics?
Michael Penn covers upper-division undergraduate material and competition problems, including number theory, abstract algebra and analysis. Mathologer proves results properly rather than gesturing at them. 3Blue1Brown handles linear algebra, differential equations and topology at a conceptual level. Above roughly third-year undergraduate, YouTube coverage thins out sharply and books take over.
Are these math YouTube channels free?
All thirteen are free to watch with no account required. Several creators also sell companion material, run membership tiers, or maintain their own websites, but nothing on this list depends on paying for it. That is the main reason to exhaust YouTube before buying a course.
Which math channel is best for young kids?
Math & Learning Videos 4 Kids for under-tens, and Mathantics as soon as a child is ready for fractions, decimals and early algebra. At both ages the video should be the smaller half of the activity, with something physical or written done immediately afterwards.
Why is The Organic Chemistry Tutor on a math list?
Because the name undersells it badly. The channel’s math library runs from arithmetic through algebra, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus and statistics, and it is one of the most complete collections of worked math examples anywhere on the platform. Students find it through chemistry and stay for the math.
How do I use YouTube to revise for a math exam?
List the topics you cannot do, not the ones you can. Take them one at a time: watch a single video, pause before each solution and attempt it, then close the tab and redo the example on blank paper. If you cannot reproduce it, watch again. Do not queue up four hours of video, and do not watch new material at double speed.
Can YouTube replace a math tutor?
Not entirely. A video answers questions its maker anticipated; a tutor looks at your working and finds the specific line where your reasoning broke. That diagnosis is the part video structurally cannot do. For everything else, including explanation, worked examples and full lecture courses, these channels compete well with paid tutoring.
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Shared this with my classmates. The descriptions for each recommendation are detailed enough to help us make informed choices.
Great compilation. This is exactly the kind of curated list that saves students hours of searching.
Thank you for putting this together. As a student on a budget, knowing which resources are worth investing time in is really valuable.
Would love to see this list updated regularly. The field changes fast and your curation is genuinely helpful.
This list helped me find resources I didn’t even know existed. Already started with your top recommendation.