Just enough money to raise 3 kids in a rich country without having to work (so he can focus on whatever project he wants) and no more. Then maximize fame.

Fame is slightly convertible into money with generally little liquidity, but is more valuable if money becomes useless in a TEOTWAWKI.

Of course, in the end, one just does whatever seems cool and useful, and the Gods decide what proportion of fame/money/power they will get. Due to Ciro's love of open source software however, a higher fame percentage seems more likely than money.

Ciro Santilli's full name is quite unique and already dominated by this Ciro Santilli.

Searching just for just "Santilli" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits. The name appears to be a minor variation of the much more common "Santini". Since the name is not that common, it is possible to go over all noteworthy hits. Some relevant ones are shown at: interesting members of the Santilli family.

Searching just for just "Ciro" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits, mostly some smaller brands that could be beaten, this is Ciro's main initial fame metric goal. Reaching it would require doing things known much beyond the programming community however, as Ciro has done until of 2019. ciro.com is from an electromechanics consultancy as of 2019, so it's not bad, let them be.

At the next useless gamified level, an honorary OBE and more ambitiously ForMemRS from the Royal Society post nominal letters would be nice.

The ultimate dream however would be to beat Cyrus the Great himself on Google searches ("Ciro" == "Cyrus" in Portuguese), maybe becoming "Cyrus the Greater"? That one will be a bit harder though. Maybe if Falung Gong becomes the dominant religion in 2000 years like Christianism did, catapulting the Judaism benefactor Cyrus into greater fame, then there is some hope for Ciro as well.

If Achilles' had his heel, Ciro had his knee.

First during University in Brazil while trying a kick up during the development of Cirodance his knee went a bit weird for a few weeks.

Then, just after arriving in France for École Polytechnique, the boys were playing indoor soccer, and to impress the girls Ciro was playing really hard, even took off his shirt, and suddenly when he was running by himself his knee snapped, he fell and it hurt like hell.

Ciro was on crutches for a few weeks, but the inflammation went away, but then he tried to play more soccer, but the knee was not as stable as before, and once he tried to run full speed, it slipped and hurt him a bit more (less severely) and so he gave up. For some reason it was not visible on the tomography made at the hospital.

Maybe Ciro should have investigated more though, certainly an experienced doctor could have done a hand pressure exam to determine which joint was damaged manually even. That was a medical failure.

So from this day on Ciro gave up on all interesting sports, and confined himself to more repetitive stuff like gym weights and cycling: Section "Ciro Santilli's sport practice". At Polytechnique he was forced to take up swimming as his mandatory sport, that was unbearably boring.

This defect is likely genetic since a close relative had similar problems.

But oh well, his then not-even girlfriend was impressed enough by the soccer or sorry enough for the sucker to marry him, so it worked out.

Sometimes, these are more than just mechanics, but also have deeper life analogues. The title of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind. Sometimes they are just mechanics.

With more philosophical metaphors:

With less philosophical metaphors:

Ciro Santilli participated in a double degree program, so he obtained have engineering degrees in both:

See also further remarks on Ciro Santilli's LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli/

Despite studying in great institutions with great teachers, Ciro feels that:

This motivated Ciro to work on OurBigBook.com.

See: Section "Ciro Santilli".

ourbigbook.com is a website created by Ciro Santilli.

The website is the reference instance of OurBigBook Web, which is part of the OurBigBook Project, the other main part of the project are software that users can run locally to publish their content such as the OurBigBook CLI.

The source code for ourbigbook.com is present at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/tree/master/web

The project documentation is present at: docs.ourbigbook.com#ourbigbook-web-user-manual

This page contains further information about the project's rationale, motivation and planning.

Many subjects have changed very little in the last hundred years, and so it is mind-blowing that people have to pay for books that teach them!

If computers are bicycles for the mind, Ciro wants this website to be the Ferrari of the mind.

Since Ciro Santilli was young, he has been bewildered by the natural sciences and mathematics due to his bad memory.

The beauty of those subjects has always felt like intense sunlight in a fresh morning to Ciro. Sometimes it gets covered by clouds and obscured by less important things, but it always comes back again and again, weaker or stronger with its warmth, guiding Ciro's life path.

As a result, he has always suffered a lot at school: his grades were good, but he wasn't really learning those beautiful things that he wanted to learn!

School, instead of helping him, was just wasting his time with superficial knowledge.

First, before university, school organization had only one goal: put you into the best universities, to make a poster out of you and get publicity, so that more parents will be willing to pay them money to put their kids into good university.

Ciro once asked a chemistry teacher some "deeper question" after course was over, related to the superficial vision of the topic they were learning to get grades in university entry exams. The teacher replied something like:Ciro feels that this was one of the greatest compliments he has ever received in his life. This teacher, understood him. Funny how some things stick, while all the rest fades.

Another interesting anecdote is how Ciro Santilli's mother recalls that she always found out about exams in the same way: when the phone started ringing as Ciro's friends started asking for help with the subjects just before the exam. Sometimes it was already too hopelessly late, but Ciro almost always tried. Nothing shows how much better you are than someone than teaching them.

Then, after entering university, although things got way better because were are able to learn things that are borderline useful.

Ciro still felt a strong emotion of nostalgia when after university his mother asked if she could throw away his high school books, and Ciro started tearing them all down for recycling. Such is life.

University teachers were still to a large extent researchers who didn't want to, know how to and above all have enough time and institutional freedom to teach things properly and make you see their beauty, some good relate articles:

The very fact that you had very little choice of what to learn so that a large group can get a "Diploma", makes it impossible for people to deeply learn what the really want.

This is especially true because Ciro was in Brazil, a third world country, where the opportunities are comparatively extremely limited to the first world.

Also extremely frustrating is how you might have to wait for years to get to the subject you really want. For example, on a physics course, quantum mechanics is normally only taught on the third year! While there is value to knowing the pre-requisites, holding people back for years is just too sad, and Ciro much prefers backward design. And just like the university entry exams, this creates an entry barrier situation where you might in the end find that "hey, that's not what I wanted to learn after all", see also: students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.

We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want. They wait through school to get into university. They wait through university to get to masters. They wait through masters to get to PhD. They wait through PhD to become a PI. And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, they become fund proposal writers. And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great. So you just become software engineer or a consultant. Is this the society that we really want?

And all of this is considering that he was very lucky to not be in a poor family, and was already in some of the best educational institutions locally available already, and had comparatively awesome teachers, without which he wouldn't be where he is today if he hadn't had such advantages in the first place.

But no matter how awesome one teacher is, no single person can overcome a system so large and broken. Without technological innovation that is.

The key problem all along the way is the Society's/Government's belief that everyone has to learn the same things, and that grades in exams mean anything.

Ciro believes however, that exams are useless, and that there are only two meaningful metrics:

Even if you wanted to really learn natural sciences and had the time available, it is just too hard to find good resources to properly learn it. Even attending university courses are hit and miss between amazing and mediocre teachers.

If you go into a large book shop, the science section is tiny, and useless popular science books dominate it without precise experiment descriptions. And then, the only few "serious" books are a huge list of formulas without any experimental motivation.

And if you are lucky to have access to an university library that has open doors, most books are likely to be old and boring as well. Googling for PDFs from university courses is the best bet.

Around 2012 however, he finally saw the light, and started his path to Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment. University was not needed anymore. He could learn whatever he wanted. A vision was born.

To make things worse, for a long time he was tired of seeing poor people begging on the streets every day and not doing anything about it. He thought:which like everything else is likely derived subconsciously from something else, here Schindler's list possibly adapted quote from the Talmud:

So, by the time he left University, instead of pursuing a PhD in theoretical Mathematics or Physics just for the beauty of it as he had once considered, he had new plans.

We needed a new educational system. One that would allow people to fulfill their potential and desires, and truly improve society as a result, both in rich and poor countries.

And he found out that programming and applied mathematics could also be fun, so he might as well have some fun while doing this! ;-)

So he started Booktree in 2014, a GitLab fork, worked on it for an year, noticed the approach was dumb, and a few years later started building this new version. The repo github.com/booktree/booktree is a small snapshot of Ciro's 2014 brain on the area, there were quite a few similar projects at the time, and most have died.

Ciro is basically a librarian at heart, and wants to be the next:

There is basically only one scalable business model in education as of the 2020's: helping teenagers pass university entry exams. And nothing else. Everything else is a "waste" of time.

Perhaps there is a little bit of publicity incentive to helping them win knowledge olympiads as well, but it is tiny in comparison, and almost certainly not a scalable investment. This may also depend on whether universities consider anything but exams, which varies by country.

That marked is completely saturated, and Ciro Santilli refuses to participate in it for moral reasons.

Beyond that, there is no scalable investment. Other non-scalable investments that could allow one to make a lifestyle business are:

Teenagers and young adults:

It is this perfect storm that places this specific section of education in such a bad shape that it is today.

This project is likely to fail. It could become the TempleOS of wikis. The project' autism score is quite high. It might be an impossible attempt at a lifestyle business. But Ciro is beyond caring now. It must be done. Other things that come to mind:

Dangerous combination:and for any crazy person who might wish to join: Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey.

More info at: docs.ourbigbook.com#ourbigbook-web-topics

Contains the first sporadic groups discovered by far: 11 and 12 in 1861, and 22, 23 and 24 in 1973. And therefore presumably the simplest! The next sporadic ones discovered were the Janko groups, only in 1965!

Each $M_n$ is a permutation group on $n$ elements. There isn't an obvious algorithmic relationship between $n$ and the actual group.

TODO initial motivation? Why did Mathieu care about k-transitive groups?

Their; k-transitive group properties seem to be the main characterization, according to Wikipedia:Looking at the classification of k-transitive groups we see that the Mathieu groups are the only families of 4 and 5 transitive groups other than symmetric groups and alternating groups. 3-transitive is not as nice, so let's just say it is the stabilizer of $M_{23}$ and be done with it.

Initial announcements by self on 2023-06-10:

Shared by others soo after:

2023-10-26 twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1717445686214504830: announcement by self after finding 75 more sites

Second wave:

Some more:/ny