In this blog post we will cover some of the basics of the Barnes Hut algorithm. This is completely new to me, it is not an algorithm I’ve used/studied before (and I am by no means an astrophysicist). Nonetheless it has piqued my interest so I have decided to write about it. In this blog I will be talking about 2 dimensions unless otherwise stated, this just makes the resulting code run a little quicker and output easier to visualise. Modifying the 2d code to be 3d (or even higher dimension) requires only minor revisions.