Coursera by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Some courses at least allow you to see material for free, e.g.: www.coursera.org/learn/quantum-optics-single-photon/lecture/UYjLu/1-1-canonical-quantization. Lots of video focus as usual for MOOCs.
It is extremely hard to find the course materials without enrolling, even if enrolling for free! By trying to make money, they make their website shit.
The comment section does have a lot of activity: www.coursera.org/learn/statistical-mechanics/discussions/weeks/2! Nice. And works like a proper issue tracker. But it is also very hidden.
EdX by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
As of 2022:
  • can't see course material before start date. Once archived, you can see it but requires login...
  • on free mode, limited course access
Fuck that.
Also, they have an ICP.
November 2023 course search:
Khan Academy by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Kudos for being a not-for-profit. Also, anyone can create content: e-learning websites must allow students to create learning content. Oh, but TODO is possible for anyone to make content publicly visible? Course join links lik: www.khanacademy.org/join/MJZ6NSV7 require login. webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/165132/how-to-create-a-course-that-is-publicly-visible-without-the-need-to-login-on-kha If that's the case, it is a fatal flaw not shared by OurBigBook.com.
Another cool aspect is that they have the "physical world teacher pull student accounts in" approach built-in quite well at course creation. This is a very good feature.
As of 2021 they were a bit struggling for money it seems: www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8XdUy-wyyM?
OpenStax by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
These people have good intentions.
The problem is that they don't manage to go critical because there's to way for students to create content, everything is manually curated.
You can't even publicly comment on the textbooks. Or at least Ciro Santilli hasn't found a way to do so. There is just a "submit suggestion" box.
This massive lost opportunity is even shown graphically at: cnx.org/about (archive) where there is a clear separation between:
  • "authors", who can create content
  • "students", who can consume content
Maybe this wasn't the case in their legacy website, legacy.cnx.org/content?legacy=true, but not sure, and they are retiring that now.
Thus, OurBigBook.com. License: CC BY! So we could re-use their stuff!
TODO what are the books written in?
Video 1.
Richard Baraniuk on open-source learning by TED (2006)
Source.
Udacity by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
It is a shame that they refocused to more applied courses. This also highlights their highly "managed" approach to content creation. Their 2022 pitch on front page says it all:
for as few as 10 hours a week, you can get the in-demand skills you need to help land a high-paying tech job
they are focused on the highly paid character of many software engineering jobs.
But one cool point of this website is how they hire tutors to help on the courses. This is a very good thing. It is a fair way of monetizing: e-learning websites must keep content free, only charge for certification.
ALSA can be thought as analogous to physical wires linking up machines.
Except that instead of machines, you have separate programs. One such typical link is:
The advantage of this setup is that separate programs can collaborate to make complex sounds.
The disadvantage of this setup is that it makes it very hard to reproduce results, you basically need a Docker image with the exact same version of everything. And some script to launch and connect all programs correctly.
Some composition systems like LMMS reduce that problem by having synthesizers as plugins, so that you don't have to setup any connections yourself.
Linear operator by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
We define it as a linear map where the domain is the same as the image, i.e. an endofunction.
Examples:
Solving differential equations was apparently Lie's original motivation for developing Lie groups. It is therefore likely one of the most understandable ways to approach it.
It appears that Lie's goal was to understand when can a differential equation have an explicitly written solution, much like Galois theory had done for algebraic equations. Both approaches use symmetry as the key tool.
Lie algebra by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Intuitively, a Lie algebra is a simpler object than a Lie group. Without any extra structure, groups can be very complicated non-linear objects. But a Lie algebra is just an algebra over a field, and one with a restricted bilinear map called the Lie bracket, that has to also be alternating and satisfy the Jacobi identity.
Another important way to think about Lie algebras, is as infinitesimal generators.
Because of the Lie group-Lie algebra correspondence, we know that there is almost a bijection between each Lie group and the corresponding Lie algebra. So it makes sense to try and study the algebra instead of the group itself whenever possible, to try and get insight and proofs in that simpler framework. This is the key reason why people study Lie algebras. One is philosophically reminded of how normal subgroups are a simpler representation of group homomorphisms.
To make things even simpler, because all vector spaces of the same dimension on a given field are isomorphic, the only things we need to specify a Lie group through a Lie algebra are:Note that the Lie bracket can look different under different basis of the Lie algebra however. This is shown for example at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015) page 71 for the Lorentz group.
As mentioned at Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) Chapter 4 "Lie Algebras", taking the Lie algebra around the identity is mostly a convention, we could treat any other point, and things are more or less equivalent.
Continuous symmetry by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Basically a synonym for Lie group which is the way of modelling them.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact