Incoming links: Applied mathematics
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.Best French engineering schools in the Times Ranking 2013 (archive)
- Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo
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:
- 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.
After learning this term, Ciro Santilli finally understood that his actual major was MR, and not bullshit like applied mathematics or control theory.
When the École Polytechnique mathematics department didn't let Ciro Santilli do his internship of choice due to grades Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
This was one of the only bad experience Ciro had at Polytechnique, besides the inevitable fear of not graduating.
Ciro wanted to do a robotics internship in Germany, linked to his interests in artificial general intelligence, see also: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games".
But the head of the applied mathematics department Polytechnique prevented him from going because Ciro didn't have the necessary grades, even though the Germans had already agreed to it: he had a C, but he needed a B. As mentioned at École Polytechnique, most Brazilians had crappy grades due to their Polytechnique-incompatible background.
This was done because in the past students with bad grades had abandoned their internships halfway and given foreigners a bad impression of Polytechnique.
It is impossible to say if the head of department really agreed with this bullshit policy, or if it was something beyond his powers and he hid his true opinion, but it felt like the agreed.
What an extremely limited view!!!
To leave the worse, the worse. To assume that grades mean anything!
And thus Ciro had to choose a last moment internship that he hated, rather than becoming the greatest roboticist that ever lived, and did terribly at it.
At least on the other hand Ciro learnt Python instead of working at the internship, and became the greatest programming tutorial writer that ever lived. Maybe.