Ciro Santilli participated in a double degree program, so he obtained have engineering degrees in both:
- 2010 - 2014: École PolytechniqueMaster 2 degree in applied mathematics.
- Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo
Despite studying in great institutions with great teachers, Ciro feels that:
- most of what he knows came from the Internet, man pages, books and his parents
- actual projects matter much more than those pieces of paper called Diplomas. You should not do like Ciro who basically did nothing but school mandated work, but instead grow some balls and focus much more or entirely on your projects
This motivated Ciro to work on OurBigBook.com.
If you are a pussy and work a soul crushing job, this is one way to lie to yourself that your life is still worth living: do one cool thing every day.
Find a time in which your mind hasn't yet been destroyed by useless work, usually in the morning before work, and do one thing you actually like in life.
Work a little less well for you boss, and a little better for yourself. Ross Ulbricht:Selling drugs online is not advisable however.
Even better, try to reach an official agreement with your employer to work 20% less than the standard work week. For example, you could work one day less every week, and do whatever you want on that day. It is not possible to push your passion to weekends, because your brain is too tired. "You keep all non-company-related IP you develop on that time" is a key clause obviously.
On a related note, good employers must allow employees to do whichever the fuck "crazy projects", "needed refactorings or other efficiency gains" and "learn things deeply" at least 20% of their time if employees want that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20%25_Project. Employees must choose if they want to do it one day a week or two hours per day. One day per month initiatives are bullshit. Another related name: genius hour.
Highly relevant on this topic: Video "What Predicts Academic Ability? by Jordan B Peterson (2017)".
I did it for me, Skyler
. Source. Pursuing a dream part time can make you feel afraid and tired. But at least, you will feel alive.Maybe you will be fired, but long term, having tried, or even succeeded your dream, or a one of its side effects, will be infinitely more satisfying.
The same goes for school, and maybe even more so because your parents can still support you there. Some Gods who actually followed this advice and didn't end up living under a bridge:
- George M. Church "[We] hope that whatever problems... contributed to your lack of success... at Duke will not keep you from a successful pursuit of a productive career." Lol, as of 2019 the dude is the most famous biotechnologist in the world, those "problems" certainly didn't keep him back.
- Freeman Dyson proved the equivalence of the three existing versions of quantum electrodynamics theories that were around at his time, and he has always been proud of not having a PhD!
- Ramanujan, from Wikipedia:
He received a scholarship to study at Government Arts College, Kumbakonam, but was so intent on mathematics that he could not focus on any other subjects and failed most of them, losing his scholarship in the process.
- Person that Ciro met personally and shall remain anonymous for now for his privacy: once Ciro was at a bar with work colleagues casually, it was cramped, and an older dude sat next to his group.The dude then started a conversation with Ciro, and soon he explained that he was a mathematician and software engineer.As a Mathematician, he had contributed to the classification of finite simple groups, and had a short Wiki page because of that.He never did a PhD, and said that academia was a waste of time, and that you can get as much done by working part time a decent job and doing your research part time, since you skip all the bullshit of academia like this.Yet, he was still invited by collaborating professors to give classes on his research subject in one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Students would call him Doctor X., and he would correct them: Mister X.As a software engineer, he had done a lot of hardcore assembly level optimizations for x86 for some mathematical libraries related to his mathematics interests. He started talking microarchitecture with Ciro's colleagues.
github.com/deepmind/lab/tree/master/game_scripts/levels/contributed/dmlab30 has some good games with video demos on YouTube, though for some weird reason they are unlisted.
TODO get one of the games running. Instructions: github.com/deepmind/lab/blob/master/docs/users/build.md. This may helpgithub.com/deepmind/lab/issues/242: "Complete installation script for Ubuntu 20.04".
It is interesting how much overlap some of those have with Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games
Why is COVID-19 so serious in some people but not in others? by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
There are a few possibilities:
- genetics
- bibliography:
- www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.abj7521 Identification of driver genes for critical forms of COVID-19 in a deeply phenotyped young patient cohort by Carapito et al. (2021)
- bibliography:
- state of the immune system based on disease history
- age
This was an intermediate step between the nuclear chain reaction prototype Chicago Pile-1 and the full blown plutonium mass production at Hanford site. Located in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Exterior of the X-10 Graphite Reactor in 1950
. Source. As a Brazilian, Ciro Santilli used to really love playing soccer (but not watching it), until he hurt his knee.
Playing soccer just feels amazing, because you are constantly running around, but with a more specific goal in mind: to get that ball into that goal!
Playing soccer was specially amazing in the flat wet sand beach of Santos. weekend, the sea, feet touching the sand, the sun going down, and your school mates next to you. Nirvana.
It is also true that under those conditions, the skin of your feet will get ripped off due to running on the slightly wet and flat sand no matter how thick it has become. But it is worth it.
Teams would often be slit between "the team with shirts vs the team without shirts", who would just take off their shirts. The two best players would take turns picking players into their teams, the first one to pick would be decided by odds and evens (par ou ímpar).
A pair of Havaianas, or Havaianas rip-offs, stuck into the sand, or even just some school bags, would do as a goal posts. More organized people, especially adults, would have their own water pipe goal with a proper net and all. But doing so would spoil the fun of endless discussions if a non flat ball had gone in or not into an imaginary rectangle.
That's how soccer was meant to be played.
Ciro hates water, so swimming is out of the question. What could be more boring than going back and forth on a fixed location a million times to gain some milliseconds?
Running would have been a consideration, but Ciro Santilli's legs sometimes itch when he runs.
This is until he ended up living in a place with decent roads for cycling in the late 2010's, which led to Ciro Santilli's cycling.
Where most of Ciro Santilli's ancestors came from, and why Ciro has the Italian nationality as well as Brazilian.
More specifically his paternal line comes from Gissi in the Abruzzo region.
Ciro feels really bad by the fact that he does not speak Italian and has never visited Gissi as of 2020.
He would likely be able to learn Italian in like 3 months because it is so similar to Portuguese and French which he already speaks.
And a cycling visit maybe? That would be amazing! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro_d'Abruzzo | www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW7wqa3vNU8&list=UU35qUU5iZPvuzcre43EV8bA&index=25
For what it is worth though, Ciro Santilli does honestly love Europe, and feels a strong desire to make it even awesomer, along with the rest of the world. Despite this being a hopeless attempt due to having more than one natural language is bad for the world.
Time-independent Schrödinger equation for a free one dimensional particle by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
so the solution is:We notice that the solution has continuous spectrum, since any value of can provide a solution.
TODO clear example of the computational problem that it solves.
- Paulo Nussenzveig physics researcher at University of São Paulo. Laboratory page: portal.if.usp.br/lmcal/pt-br/node/323: LMCAL, laboratory of coherent manipulation of atoms and light. Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/citations?user=FbGL0BEAAAAJ
- Brazil Quantum: interest group created by students. Might be a software consultancy: www.terra.com.br/noticias/tecnologia/inovacao/pesquisadores-paulistas-tentam-colocar-brasil-no-mapa-da-computacao-quantica,2efe660fbae16bc8901b1d00d139c8d2sz31cgc9.html
- DOBSLIT dobslit.com/en/the-company/ company in São Carlos, as of 2022 a quantum software consultancy with 3 people: www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?currentCompany=%5B%2272433615%22%5D&origin=COMPANY_PAGE_CANNED_SEARCH&sid=TAj two of them from the Federal University of São Carlos
- computacaoquanticabrasil.com/ Website half broken as of 2022. Mentions a certain Lagrange Foundation, but their website is down.
- QuInTec academic interest group
- www.terra.com.br/noticias/tecnologia/inovacao/pesquisadores-paulistas-tentam-colocar-brasil-no-mapa-da-computacao-quantica,2efe660fbae16bc8901b1d00d139c8d2sz31cgc9.html mentions 6 professors, 3 from USP 3 from UNICAMP interest group:
- drive.google.com/file/d/1geGaRuCpRHeuLH2MLnLoxEJ1iOz4gNa9/view white paper gives all names
- Celso Villas-Bôas
- Frederico Brito
- Gustavo Wiederhecker
- Marcelo Terra Cunha
- Paulo Nussenzveig
- Philippe Courteille
- sites.google.com/unicamp.br/quintec/home their website.
- a 2021 symposium they organized: www.saocarlos.usp.br/dia-09-quintec-quantum-engineering-workshop/ some people of interest:
- Samuraí Brito www.linkedin.com/in/samuraí-brito-4a57a847/ at Itaú Unibanco, a Brazilian bank
- www.linkedin.com/in/dario-sassi-thober-5ba2923/ from wvblabs.com.br/
- www.linkedin.com/in/roberto-panepucci-phd from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centro_de_Pesquisas_Renato_Archer in Campinas
- Quanby quantum software in Florianópolis, founder Eduardo Duzzioni
- thequantumhubs.com/category/quantum-brazil-news/ good links
- qubit.lncc.br/?lang=en Quantum Computing Group of the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing: pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratório_Nacional_de_Computação_Científica in Rio. The principal researcher seems to be www.lncc.br/~portugal/. He knows what GitHub is: github.com/programaquantica/tutoriais, PDF without .tex though.
- quantum-latino.com/ conference. E.g. 2022: www.canva.com/design/DAFErjU3Wvk/2xo25nEuqv9O7RbCPLNEkw/view
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:
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







