Existence and uniqueness results are fundamental in mathematics because we often define objects by their properties, and then start calling them "the object", which is fantastically convenient.
But calling something "the object" only makes sense if there exists exactly one, and only one, object that satisfies the properties.
One particular context where these come up very explicitly is in solutions to differential equations, e.g. existence and uniqueness of solutions of partial differential equations.
Ciro Santilli intends to move his beauty list here little by little: github.com/cirosantilli/mathematics/blob/master/beauty.md
The most beautiful things in mathematics are results that are:
Good lists of such problems Lists of mathematical problems.
Whenever Ciro Santilli learns a bit of mathematics, he always wonders to himself:
Am I achieving insight, or am I just memorizing definitions?
Unfortunately, due to how man books are written, it is not really possible to reach insight without first doing a bit of memorization. The better the book, the more insight is spread out, and less you have to learn before reaching each insight.
Zongzi by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Eaten during Dragon Boat Festival, but can be bought year round.
Buy frozen. Pick the ones with meat and eggs!!! Boil.
Cost about 4 dollars for 2.
You can't eat them every day because too heavy, but they are so amazingly tasty!!!
Complex analysis by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The surprising thing is that a bunch of results are simpler in complex analysis!
Identity theorem by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Essentially, defining an holomorphic function on any open subset, no matter how small, also uniquely defines it everywhere.
This is basically why it makes sense to talk about analytic continuation at all.
One way to think about this is because the Taylor series matches the exact value of an holomorphic function no matter how large the difference from the starting point.
Therefore a holomorphic function basically only contains as much information as a countable sequence of numbers.
Position operator by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This operator case is surprisingly not necessarily mathematically trivial to describe formally because you often end up getting into the Dirac delta functions/continuous spectrum: as mentioned at: mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics
Lepton by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Can be contrasted with baryons as mentioned at baryon vs meson vs lepton.
White paper by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
White papers are a form of advertisement. They are not peer reviewed papers and are generally not reproducible; their value lies entirely in trust of their publisher rather than being able to verify their claims.

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