With major mathematicians holding ideas such as:it is not surprise that the state of STEM education is so shit as of 2020, especially at the the missing link between basic and advanced! This also implies that the number of people that can appreciate any advanced mathematics research is tiny, and consequently so is the funding.
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. [...] It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.
Ciro Santilli's wife, who was frustrated with academia at some point, admires the fact that Simons managed to make infinite money, and then invested back in actual science, e.g. through the Simons Foundation.
Jim Simons in 2007
. Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain Nelson-Mandela.jpg by 
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16bitfossil.com/78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e/ in block 273536 (2013-12-07).
This is one of the earliest AtomSea & EMBII uploads.
Nelson-Mandela.jpg"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." - Nelson Mandela Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, politician and philanthropist who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. - Wikipedia Born: July 18, 1918, Mvezo, South Africa Died: December 5, 2013.
It is hard to decide what makes Ciro Santilli more sad: the usage of Greek letters, the invention of new symbols, or the fifty million alternative font styles used.
Only Chinese characters could be worse than that!
Mathematical symbol that looks like a Greek letter but isn't by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16These are not in the Greek alphabet:
By Evan Chen.
- Renders: stacks.math.columbia.edu/. HTML is one tiny section per page, making it unreadable.
- LaTeX source: github.com/stacks/stacks-project
The book is very dry, extremelly boring unfortunately. Definition and theorem only for the most part.
When you see some tagged examples, you will immediately know what this means.
He got so old from 2012 to 2021 :-)
This dude did well. If only he had written a hyperlinked wiki rather than making videos! It would allow people to jump in at any point and just click back. It would be Godlike.
mathdoctorbob.org/About.html says:
Robert Donley received his doctorate in Mathematics from Stony Brook University and has over two decades of teaching experience at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels.
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain Technically interesting ordinal by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16This section is about ordinals that are interesting primarily due to technical reasons linked to edge cases of the protocol.
Interesting MIME types:
- ordinals.com/inscription/dad86d722156b8c384c1f3243e40aa7a0f6f5be496bc24e19485831584f9803fi0: mime type is an UTF-8 orange emoji "🟠"
- ordinals.com/inscription/bc7b86245159cdf8bc63489687909f766a0a0e08279d23fb077cdd60ab1e9f22i0: mime type is an XSS attempt:
<script>alert('xss in content type')</script> tx=bc7b86245159cdf8bc63489687909f766a0a0e08279d23fb077cdd60ab1e9f22 - ordinals.com/inscription/bc7b86245159cdf8bc63489687909f766a0a0e08279d23fb077cdd60ab1e9f22i0: mime type is "FuckYou"
- ordinals.com/inscription/00b0ece72217ce49b637b3f9bf5335bc245e588568aa0676581b40c1bedc521di0: the mime is a long JSON. However, it does appear to be a valid feature as it rendered specially on ordinals.com.
Different
ord markers:- 71e85885522047240a9e70542145dbf2385e1bd468e6ac6002aa755422ea10f5 uses
takingnames. Decode with:gives the PNG of the wireframe draing of a washing machine with transparent background.bitcoin-core.cli decodescript "$(bitcoin-core.cli getrawtransaction 71e85885522047240a9e70542145dbf2385e1bd468e6ac6002aa755422ea10f5 true | jq -r '.vin[0].txinwitness[1]')" | jq -r .asm | sed 's/.* 0 //;s/ OP_ENDIF//;s/ //g' | xxd -r -p > 71e85885522047240a9e70542145dbf2385e1bd468e6ac6002aa755422ea10f5.png
Repeat this mantra:
Only decentralize when inevitable.
Only decentralize when inevitable.
Only decentralize when inevitable.
This is what society gets for not using open knowledge: some of its best minds will be bound to waste endless hours reversing some useless technology.
With that said, even when you do have the source code, reading run logs and using debuggers are a sort of reverse engineering at heart.
One of the most jaw dropping reverse engineering projects Ciro has ever seen is the Super Mario 64 reverse engineering project.
Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.
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 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. 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.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
.jpg){kind=link}
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