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Once you have crated something awesome, you have to advertise it, otherwise no one will ever find it.
This means:
- Then ask them if they want to talk about anything.
- whenever someone asks as question on an online forum, answer it, and link to the section of your material that also answers that question.The material will answer many of their future questions.
Eventually, people will find you on the front page of Google searches, and then you will know that you've truly made something useful.
Then, if people find errors, or have questions, they will write a comment near the content itself.
Then, next person that comes along and has the same problem, will also find that comment, and your answer will solve their problems too.
The perfect way to do this is to use GitHub issues
People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
Everything you want to teach is already online.
And if it is not, then you are wasting your time saying it face-to-face instead of creating such online resource.
The only goal of meeting students is talking to them individually or in small groups to:
- understand what they feel
- transmit your passion for the subject
and letting them do the same amongst themselves.
If you talk to a large group, you will only reach / understand a very small percentage of the group, so your time is wasted.
It is better to deeply understand what 25% of the students feel and adapt the course material, than to talk to everyone at once, and have only 5% understand anything.
How to teach Publish your material even if it is not perfect by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Just make it very clear what you've tried, what you observed, and what you don't understand if anything at all.
This will already open up room for others to come and expand on your attempt, and you are more likely to learn the answers to your questions as they do.
And there's a good chance someone who knows more than you will come along and correct or teach you something new about the subject. For example, this has happened countless times to Ciro Santilli when doing Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Examples of famous fails:
- QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 7.11 "Epilogue" mentions how Julian Schwinger has lots of unpublished notes, or that his collaborators had to write most of the stuff down themselves in the end because he felt they were not perfect enough
How to teach Exams and homework are useless, only projects matter by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
See: Section "Exam".
The only thing that matters is that students aim towards the goals described at explain how to make money with the lesson.
Any "homework for which the student cannot use existing resources available online" is a waste of time.
The ideal way to go about it is to reach some intermediate milestone, and then document it. You don't have to do the hole thing! Just go until your patience with it runs out. But while you are doing it, go as deep and wide as you possibly can, without mercy.
This is actually how Ciro Santilli learns new subjects he is curious about, even as an adult! Some examples:
Other people with similar philosophies:
Finding a complete basis such that each vector solves a given differential equation is the basic method of solving partial differential equation through separation of variables.
The first example of this you must see is solving partial differential equations with the Fourier series.
Notable examples:
- Fourier series for the heat equation as shown at Fourier basis is complete for and solving partial differential equations with the Fourier series
- Hermite functions for the quantum harmonic oscillator
- Legendre polynomials for Laplace's equation in spherical coordinates
- Bessel function for the 2D wave equation on a circular domain in polar coordinates
What big companies have been created in Europe after World War II, that have not been bought or utterly defeated by American or Japanese companies?Because of all these failures, much fanfare was made as Spotify reached a $50B market capitalization in 2020. An art company, so cute!
- International Computers Limited fully bought by Fujitsu in 1998 after a long decline. The Fujitsu Wikipedia entry contains the emblematic image caption:So much for The Queen. This was a prelude to Arm's sale somewhat.
The Fujitsu office in Bracknell, United Kingdom, formerly an ICL site and opened by HM the Queen in 1976
- Solexa sold to Illumina (American company) for 600M USD in 2007. As of 2020 is still the basis for the dominant DNA sequencing technology in the world
- CSR sold to Qualcomm (American company) for 2.5B USD in 2015
- Dotmatics sold to Insightful Science for $690M[ref] in 2021. To add insult to inujury, Insightful changed its brand to Dotmatics later on.
- Arm sold to Softbank (32B USD in 2016)? ARM being of course the fortunate leftover of Acorn Computers's defeat to the more edible Apple
As of 2023, the LVMH was the most valuable company in Europe by market capitalization[ref]. Luxury goods. An area of industry that borders between the useless and the evil.
Europe has basically become an outsourcing hub for the United States. The fact that its starts are all sold if they become large enough just means that R&D is also outsourced.
ASML, and perhaps more meaningfully its parent/predecessor ASM International from 1964 is perhaps the biggest exception.
The key problem is that there are so many small countries in Europe, that any startup has to deal with too many incompatible legislation and cannot easily sell to the hole of Europe and scale. So then a larger company from a more uniform country comes and eats it up!
Talent mobility is another issue:
- people can't generally work remotely from different countries for the same company as regular employees, only as contractors. This is because of fiscal incompatibilities across countries[ref][ref], and has become an increasing problem in the 2020's with the increase in remote work possibilities during/after COVID-19.
- it is quite rare for people to study at university in different countries than their own, because the entry examinations are in the native language and have local history knowledge components. This also means that people from different countries don't easily recognize which are the best Universities of other countries, making you take a hit if you want to search for jobs elsewhere
Because the countries are still essentially walled off by languages. Europe is the perfect example of why having more than one natural language is bad for the world.
You just can't go study or work in any other country (except for the UK, when it was still in the EU) without putting a huge effort into learning its language first.
Without this, there isn't enough mixing to truly make cultures more uniform, and therefore allow the laws to be more uniform.
Europe can't even unify basic things like:
- a marriage registry
- the mail system, parcels often getting lost and require you to contact people who may not speak English
- the train systems: www.linkedin.com/posts/hinrich-thoelken_cop26-activity-6863490595072045057-Xhlg/
Equally so, it can't force little fiscal paradises who effectively benefit from being in Europe like Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland ("not European", but should that be allowed?) and Cyprus (the EU can't even maintain its territorial integrity, let alone fiscal) to not offer ridiculously low taxes and incentives which make them entry points for foreign companies to rape Europe.
For this reason, Europe will only continue to go downhill with the years, and the United Kingdom will continue to try and endosymbiose into a state of the United States (although at times it seems that it would rather endosymbiose with China instead). On 2025 the British parliament beautifully put it that the country:
risks becoming an "incubator economy"
Historically, this disunion is partly due to the European balance of power, whereby countries would form alliances with old enemies to prevent another country from taking over. Also linked are failed military unification attempts by Napoleon and Hitler, though we are likely better off without the latter succeeding!!! Though those also partly failed due to wider balance of power issues involving the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and USA, not only due to internal balance. Of course, none of that matters anymore after World War II, where other more unified Europe-sized potencies rose, first the USA and the Soviet Union, and then China, and now European disunion is nothing but a burden.
One thing must be said in favour of Europe's mess however: it favours international collaboration in huge projects as a more neutral middle ground. This can be seen more clearly in the ITER and the fiasco that was the Superconducting Super Collider that was cancelled a couple of billion dollars in partly because it failed to attract any foreign investment, compared to the Large Hadron Collider which went on to find the Higgs boson as mentioned at www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supercollider-that-never-was/.
Bibliography:
- www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-mission-europe-economy/ Von der Leyen's mission: Stop Europe's 'slow agony' of decline (2024)
Directly modelled by group.
For continuous symmetries, see: Lie group.
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!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- 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-calculusArticles 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/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - 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.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.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. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
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





