Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

This is one of the main reasons why Ciro Santilli invested in OurBigBook.com.

Ciro believes that the only thing students must be forced to learn is to speak read and write English and that a teacher's main job after that is to help students find their next big goals and also ties into the backward design philosophy.

Everything else, the student must choose.

This idea is generally known as self-directed learning.

This is most notable in University entry examinations of poor countries, where students often have to waste one extra year of their lives to go through preparation for the useless university entry exams. And then, surprise surprise, if they actually get in, they find that this is not what they really wanted to do, and they just go through to the end miserably because they understandably they don't want to risk another year of their lives.

And importantly: It must be easy to change your area of study.

Ciro saw this first hand École Polytechnique which was way freer than his university in Brazil.

Steve Jobs's university dropout stories from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address also come to mind.

Interesting projects:

Godfrey Hounsfield, 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine:^[ref]

Related ideas:

What you Google-into when trying to understand English slangs as of 2020.

Islam has some really nice things in it.

The way it was perverted to be used as a tool for terrorism by some is a great tragedy.

Ciro Santilli especially appreciates the ideas of

First we hand-wave some intuition. Then we prove. That's the way to teach.

Similar to quantum supremacy, but add the goal that the computation must be useful, i.e. make money or solve some open mathematical problem, Ciro Santilli's wife was quite excited about the possibility of finding some counter examples in number theory with quantum computers.

Most commonly refers to: exponential map.