This intro is boring, take me to the songs.

I've watched and listened to a lot of maths or science songs, and this page is my attempt to have all the ones I like in one place, in approximate rank order of how much I like them. The most useful source has been the Sing About Science & Math database; I semi-systematically played the videos it listed whose age range included any years 18 or above. Occasionally I played a high-school level song and liked it enough to include it.

All other things equal, songs are funnier if the subject matter is more technical. Since my background is maths and physics, this introduces a bias into my rankings: I can pick a highly technical maths or physics song, and therefore find it entertaining. But anything from first-year biology onwards appears as an amorphous mess of words I don't know, so my appreciation of bio videos is often limited to how well the video is put together, the quality of the singing, etc.

A second bias is how much I like the song being parodied, or the style of music if I'm listening to an original song. In my rankings, this disadvantages rap while advantaging parodies of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

There are a lot of maths or science songs on YouTube, and most of them aren't very good. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but this Bolzano-Weierstrass rap has over 20,000 views, so hopefully it's not too mean to pick on it. With some decent accompaniment, and people who actually wanted to be there, it could have been the greatest Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem song ever made. Well of course, it still has that distinction, but it'll lose it once someone else sings or raps about that topic.

Nevertheless, I appreciate all of the science songs on YouTube, terrible or otherwise. I went to a few annual poetry nights at the UQ physics club, and most of the poems or songs were pretty terrible, but there were always a couple of good ones and overall they were fun evenings. It's just that once you film a physics song and put it on YouTube, you stop comparing it to the low-quality output of undergrad physics students and start comparing it to properly good YouTube videos designed to make you laugh, like something by Tim Minchin.

And despite those comparisons being almost always unfavourable, still there are a heap of science people out there (usually but not always students) who post their videos anyway, YouTube dislikes and low view counts be damned. And I'm glad that all these people exist, deriving enjoyment from putting science words into melodies and hoping that we might enjoy their words and melodies too.

I want to talk about one video in particular. It's called Les Miserables Larides, an adaptation by some Cornell students of Les Mis to their seagull (family name Laridae) research. The singing is not always in key, and there's no really fancy production involved. I give it a rating of 3.5 out of 5 in the table below, and it's languishing on just over a thousand views. It goes for over 18 minutes, and I've watched it straight through twice. I came away with two strong impressions:

• These people really like Les Mis.
• These people really really like seagulls. They like seagulls more than anyone I've ever met.

It makes me happier about the world to know that there are people who care this much about seagulls, dedicating years of their lives to their study, filming them for minutes on end as part of that research and then singing Les Mis songs over that video.

The song list follows. The rank ordering is not perfect, and sometimes descends into something approximately alphabetical when I can't really say which ones I like better.

Posted 2014-09-06, last updated 2016-08-25 (recent Tim Blais songs).