William Pogue (1930–2019) was an American astronaut, educator, and author. He is best known for his role as a NASA astronaut, having flown on the Skylab 4 mission in 1973, which was the last and longest manned mission to the Skylab space station. During this mission, Pogue and his crewmates conducted scientific experiments and observations while living in space for 84 days.
Charlie Papazian is a prominent figure in the brewing community, best known for his contributions to the craft beer movement in the United States. He is the author of the influential book "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing," which has helped countless individuals learn the art and science of brewing beer at home. Papazian is also a founder of the American Homebrewers Association and has played a significant role in promoting homebrewing and craft beer culture.
Ciara Sivels is known for her work in the field of engineering and for being a prominent advocate for diversity and inclusion in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). She has a notable background in engineering, particularly in the aerospace industry. She gained recognition for her efforts in mentoring young engineers and promoting greater representation of women and minorities in technical fields.
Yoshio Shimamoto is a prominent figure known for his contributions to the field of art, specifically as a Japanese artist and a key member of the Gutai group, which was an influential post-war art movement in Japan. The Gutai group, founded in 1954, was characterized by its emphasis on experimentation, the use of unconventional materials, and the integration of art with the physical environment.
David Lochbaum is a prominent nuclear engineer and safety advocate known for his work on nuclear power plant safety issues. He has been associated with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), where he has focused on improving the safety and reliability of nuclear reactors. Lochbaum has authored various reports and articles addressing the risks associated with nuclear energy and has been involved in discussions about regulatory practices and emergency preparedness in the nuclear industry.
J. Michael Gilmore is known for being a significant figure in the field of academia, particularly in the areas of research, education, or industry. However, without specific context, it's difficult to provide a detailed answer. If you meant a specific person with notable achievements or a particular role (like a researcher, educator, author, etc.), please provide more context or specify which J.
As of my last update in October 2023, Jacek Jędruch does not appear to be a widely recognized public figure, academic, or significant personality in popular culture, history, or any other field. It’s possible that he may be a local figure, professional, or a person who gained prominence after that time, or he could simply be an individual with limited public visibility.
Mario P. Fiori is a name that may refer to individuals involved in various professional fields, but there is no widely known or prominent figure by that name in popular culture, science, or sports as of my last update in October 2023.
Ralph Izzo is an American businessman known primarily for his role in the energy sector. He serves as the chairman, president, and CEO of Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), a publicly traded energy company based in New Jersey. Under his leadership, PSEG has focused on clean energy initiatives, sustainability, and advancements in technology to meet the evolving needs of energy generation and distribution. Izzo has a background in engineering and business, which has contributed to his strategic vision for PSEG.
American astrophysicists are scientists in the United States who study the physical properties and underlying processes of celestial objects and phenomena. Astrophysics is a branch of astronomy that applies the principles of physics and chemistry to understand stars, galaxies, black holes, the interstellar medium, cosmic microwave background radiation, and the universe as a whole. American astrophysicists work in various settings, including universities, government research institutions, and private organizations.
Beverley Taylor is not widely recognized as a specific term or entity as of my last update. It's possible that it could refer to a person, perhaps someone notable in a particular field, or it might be related to a specific context that isn't well-documented in mainstream sources.
Shock compression of condensed matter refers to the behavior of materials when subjected to high-pressure shock waves, typically generated by explosive detonations, impacts, or other rapid compression events. This phenomenon is crucial in various fields, including materials science, astrophysics, and planetary science, to understand the physical and chemical properties of materials under extreme conditions. ### Key Aspects of Shock Compression: 1. **Shock Waves**: These are abrupt changes in pressure, temperature, and density traveling through a medium.
American geophysicists are scientists who study the physical processes and properties of the Earth using principles of physics. They may focus on various aspects of the Earth, including its structure, dynamics, magnetic and gravitational fields, and seismic activities. Geophysicists use techniques and tools such as seismic data analysis, satellite measurements, and computer modeling to investigate the Earth's interior and surface processes, contributing to our understanding of natural phenomena like earthquakes, volcanic activity, and climate change.
The term "American physicists by state" could refer to the distribution of physicists across different states in the United States. While there is no comprehensive public database that lists all physicists by state, we can generally infer that states with major research institutions, universities, and technological industries tend to have larger populations of physicists.
OurBigBook.com / Blogs by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Where blog is taken in a wide sense, including e.g. Medium, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc.
The main shortcoming of blogs is the lack of topic convergence across blogs. Each blog is a moderated castle. So who is the best user for a given topic, or the best content for a given tag, across the entire website?
The only reasonable free material we have for advanced subjects nowadays are university lecture notes.
While some of those are awesome, when writing a large content, no one can keep quality high across all sections, there will always be knowledge that you don't have which is enlightening. And Googlers are more often than not interested only in specific sections of your content.
Our website aims to make smaller subjects vertically curated across horizontal single author tutorials.
MIT calculus course             UCLA calculus course

* Calculus                <---> * Calculus
  * Limit                 <--->   * Limit
    * Limit of a function
    * Limit of a series   <--->     * Limit of a series
  * Derivative            <--->   * Derivative
                                    * L'Hôpital's rule
  * Integral              <--->   * Integral
Some more links:
A list of reviews of such systems is maintained at:
This is the class of existing software the perhaps comes the closest to OurBigBook, in particular systems such as:
While we believe that OurBigBook can hold its own against most of them as a personal knowledge base, there is one feature which we believe truly distinguishes OurBigBook from all others in a big way: trustless mind meld with the OurBigBook topic feature, which no other system seems to have.
Many such systems are also no publishing focused enough, and are more focused only in maintaining people's private knowledge bases. Some of them don't even have publishing at all, or its complicated. While publishing is optional in OurBigBook, it is a crucial feature and extremely well supported.
This website basically aims to be a learning management system, allowing in particular a teacher to focus his help on students that he is legally obliged to help due to their job. But it will have the following unusual characteristics in current LMS solutions:
  • public first, to allow reuse across universities, rather than paywalled as is the case for most top universities
  • students can create material just like teachers, both are on equal footing. Students/teachers will see an indicator "this is your teacher"/"this is your student for this/past semester", but that is the only difference between their interfaces.
If Ciro Santilli were to write a book about quantum mechanics as of 2020 (before OurBigBook.com went live), he would upload an OurBigBook Markup website to GitHub Pages.
But there is one major problem with that: the entry barrier for new contributors is very large.
If they submit a pull request, Ciro has to review it, otherwise, no one will ever see it.
Our amazing website would allow the reader to add his own example of, say, The uncertainty principle, whenever they wants, under the appropriate section.
Then, people who want to learn more about it, would click on the "defined tag" by the article, and our amazing analytics would point them to the best such articles.
The steps are sorted in roughly chronological order. The project might fail at any point, and some steps may be carried in parallel:
  • make OurBigBook Markup good enough, to the point that it allows to create a static version of the website, which is used to prototype certain ideas, and for Ciro to start writing test content.
    Status March 2022: reached a point that it is already highly usable. The following website may continue.
  • create a basic implementation of the website, without advanced features like PageRank sorting and WYSIWYG. This is not much more than a blog with some extra metadata, so it is definitely achievable with constrained resources.
  • find a university teacher would would like to try it out.
    Ciro would like to volunteer to work for free for this teacher and students to help the students learn.
    He would like act like a "super student" who has a lot of free time and motivation.
    Ciro would start by mapping the headers of the lecture notes onto the website, and then slowly adding content as he feels the need to improve certain explanations.
    Finding teachers willing to allow this will be a major roadblock: how to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA.
    If such enlightened teacher is found, it will allow for the initial validation of the website, to decide what kind of tweaking the idea might need, and start uploading quality technical content to the site.
  • once some level of validation as been done, Ciro will start looking for charitable charitable grant opportunities more aggressively
  • if things seem to be working, start adding more advance features: PageRank-like ranking sorting and WYSIWYG editing
    The recommendation algorithms notably is left for a second stage because it needs real world data to be tested. And at the beginning, before Eternal September kicks in, there would be few posts written by well educated university students, so a simple sort by upvote would likely be good enough.
Ciro decided to start with a decent markup language with a decent implementation: OurBigBook Markup. Once that gets reasonable, he will move on to another attempt at the website itself.
The project description was originally at: github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website but being migrated here. The original working project name was "Write free books to get famous website", until Ciro decided to settle for OurBigBook.com and fixed the domain name.

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