Exceptional object by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Oh, and the dude who created the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exceptional_object Wikipedia page won an Oscar: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF_FLN-TmCY, Dan Piponi, aka @sigfpe. Cool dude.
Cool examples:
Hilbert's problems by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
He's a bit overly obsessed with polynomials for the taste of modern maths, but it's still fun.
Form of government by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Rasselas Prince of Abyssinia CHAPTER VIII www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/652/pg652-images.html:
Oppression is, in the Abyssinian dominions, neither frequent nor tolerated; but no form of government has been yet discovered by which cruelty can be wholly prevented. Subordination supposes power on one part and subjection on the other; and if power be in the hands of men it will sometimes be abused. The vigilance of the supreme magistrate may do much, but much will still remain undone. He can never know all the crimes that are committed, and can seldom punish all that he knows.
You start with a very small list of:
Using those rules, you choose a target string that you want to reach, and then try to reach it. Before the target string is reached, mathematicians call it a "conjecture".
Mathematicians call the list of transformation rules used to reach a string a "proof".
Since every step of the proof is very simple and can be verified by a computer automatically, the entire proof can also be automatically verified by a computer very easily.
Finding proofs however is undoubtedly an uncomputable problem.
Most mathematicians can't code or deal with the real world in general however, so they haven't created the obviously necessary: website front-end for a mathematical formal proof system.
The fact that Mathematics happens to be the best way to describe physics and that humans can use physical intuition heuristics to reach the NP-hard proofs of mathematics is one of the great miracles of the universe.
Once we have mathematics formally modelled, one of the coolest results is Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which states that for any reasonable proof system, there are necessarily theorems that cannot be proven neither true nor false starting from any given set of axioms: those theorems are independent from those axioms. Therefore, there are three possible outcomes for any hypothesis: true, false or independent!
Some famous theorems have even been proven to be independent of some famous axioms. One of the most notable is that the Continuum Hypothesis is independent from Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory! Such independence proofs rely on modelling the proof system inside another proof system, and forcing is one of the main techniques used for this.
Figure 1.
The landscape of modern Mathematics comic by Abstruse Goose
. Source. This comic shows that Mathematics is one of the most diversified areas of useless human knowledge.
de Broglie relations by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Relates particle momentum and its wavelength, or equivalently, energy and frequency.
The wavelength relation is:
but since:
the wavelength relation implies:
Particle wavelength can be for example measured very directly on a double-slit experiment.
So if we take for example electrons of different speeds, we should be able to see the diffraction pattern change accordingly.
Tax the rich by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
How the rich avoid paying taxes by Vox (2021)
Source. Features interview with Morris Pearl, a rich dude that is campaigning to tax the rich. He also participates in an association called "Patriotic Millionaires" to further this agenda.
Video 2.
What Eating the Rich Did For Japan by Asianometry (2021)
Source.

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 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    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.
  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