---
id: people/vi-hart
about:
  label: Vi Hart
  depiction: people/vi-hart.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'Thane Plambeck, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.'
  description: >-
    American mathematician and video maker who co-created Parable of the
    Polygons, a playable version of Schelling's segregation model, and founded
    the VR research group eleVR.
  tags:
    - mathematics
    - explorable explanation
    - virtual reality
person:
  affiliation: eleVR
  role: mathematician and video maker
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Vi Hart (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_Hart'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Vi Hart, born in 1988, is an American mathematician and online video creator who describes themself as a "recreational mathemusician".[^1] Their videos, starting in 2010 with a series on doodling in maths class, made them widely known, and they made videos for Khan Academy.[^1] With Matt Parker they won the 2018 Communications Award of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics.[^1] They have co-authored papers on computational geometry and the mathematics of paper folding.[^1]

In 2014 Hart co-founded eleVR, a group researching virtual reality.[^1] The same year Hart and Nicky Case made the playable post Parable of the Polygons on Thomas Schelling's model of segregation.[^1] In 2016 eleVR joined the Human Advancement Research Community at Y Combinator Research, where Hart was a principal investigator.[^1] Hart later worked in the Societal Resilience Group at Microsoft, as a senior research project manager and a director of policy and strategy, and left Microsoft and the technology industry in 2022.[^1]

The wiki carries [Parable of the Polygons](/communication/parable-of-the-polygons/).