Teaching statement by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Part of the motivation letter required by some American universities explaining how amazing of a teacher you are, e.g.: wstein.org/job/Teaching/index.html
DPhil by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Short for Doctor of Philosophy, it's how some weird places like the University of Oxford say PhD. In Oxford they also analogously say MPHil.
Royal Society by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
They do two things:
Exam as a service by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This is Ciro Santilli's name for the idea that we should not have structured degrees at university that require entry exams, only tests that anybondy could take, likely for free, and then they would just have proof that they know the stuff for e.g. teachers that care about a subject while selecting students to work with them in research.
We just need control rooms where someone can watch students for cheating. Multiple different exams can be taken in the same room of course, students just have to sign up in advance. The exams should happen regularly depending on demand. E.g. extremelly common subjects should happen every month, and highly specialized ones every 6 months or 1 year.
Questions should be always taken from an open question pool which also contains answers, thus allowing anyone to effectively study for it.
How many questions can you actually come up with about a given non research subject, right?
We then make an API available, so that students can grant access to specific results to anyone they choose, or even make the results public for anyone to see. This way the people that care about the exams can just machine learn what exams correlate with their desired performance.
Autodidacticism by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
There are two types of people:
  • those who are autodidacts
  • those who didn't really learn
Some possible definitions:
  • learning without a gun pointed at your head
  • learning from an e-book or video rather than from a talking head 5 rows of chairs in front of you
    How that is different from a video, you tell me.

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