Nabla symbol by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Nabla is one of those: it was completely made up in modern times, and just happens to look like an inverted upper case delta to make things even more confusing!
Nabla means "harp" in Greek, which looks like the symbol.
Divergence by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Takes a vector field as input and produces a scalar field.
Mnemonic: it gives out the amount of fluid that is going in or out of a given volume per unit of time.
Therefore, if you take a cubic volume:
  • the input has to be the 6 flows across each face, therefore 3 derivatives
  • the output is the variation of the quantity of fluid, and therefore a scalar
Hyperplane by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Generalization of a plane for any number of dimensions.
Kind of the opposite of a line: the line has dimension 1, and the plane has dimension D-1.
In , both happen to coincide, a boring example of an exceptional isomorphism.
Lit: fish timber question answer.
The dialog is also known as allegory for an incredibly deep philosophical discussion between an idealized wise woodcutter and a fisherman, e.g. mentioned at: www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Writings/Fisherman%20and%20Woodcutter.pdf
This song is just too slow for Ciro Santilli to make much out of it.
Figure 1.
Dialog between Fisherman and Woodcutter Chinese traditional painting by Xie Shichen
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Video 2.
Dialog between Fisherman and Woodcutter performed by Wu Jinglüe
. Source. Accompagnied by di flute to reinforce the idea of two voices. This one has TODO year.
Does not require straight line cuts.
Lorentz covariance by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Same motivation as Galilean invariance, but relativistic version of that: we want the laws of physics to have the same form on all inertial frames, so we really want to write them in a way that is Lorentz covariant.
This is just the relativistic version of that which takes the Lorentz transformation into account instead of just the old Galilean transformation.
Real projective space by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
In those cases at least, it is possible to add a metric to the spaces, leading to elliptic geometry.
It good to think about how Euclid's postulates look like in the real projective plane:
Unlike the real projective line which is homotopic to the circle, the real projective plane is not homotopic to the sphere.
The topological difference bewteen the sphere and the real projective space is that for the sphere all those points in the x-y circle are identified to a single point.
One more generalized argument of this is the classification of closed surfaces, in which the real projective plane is a sphere with a hole cut and one Möbius strip glued in.
"Ibis redibis nunquam per bella peribis" is a Latin phrase that translates to "You will go, you will return; you will never die through war." This phrase is part of a longer poem known as "Ibis," attributed to the Roman poet Ovid. The work is characterized by its exploration of themes such as fate, death, and revenge, often invoking mythical references and a sense of foresight.

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