Maybe Ciro Santilli should do something useful and remarkable so that someone might actually want to read his biography in the first place. But hey, procrastination.
Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil in the small/medium city of Rio Claro, São Paulo (~200k people in 2020) in the State of São Paulo in 1989 AD.
The family then moved to Jundiaí in 1995, and then finally to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil in 1997.
At the age of 10, Ciro Santilli spent 10 months in Coventry, United Kingdom, where he greatly improved his English.
After Coventry, Ciro's family went back to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, which made a deep impression on Ciro, until he Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo in 2007.
In 2010, as mentioned atSection "Ciro Santilli's formal education", Ciro as admitted in a double degree program at the École Polytechnique, France, where he stayed until 2013. Going to France was a mind blowing, life changing event.
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.
Firstly, in 2012, while he was at École Polytechnique, Ciro Santilli was introduced to LaTeX (thank God for French mathematical obsession), and his mind was blown:he though. Why isn't everyone doing that!
Ha, so I can write my own books, and so can anyone, for free?
One particular event stood out: Ciro made a small change to his teacher's course material, who blessed be him (dude's a legend, Ciro just noticed he has some Chinese publications with another French dude, e.g. www.amazon.co.uk/高效算法-应试与提高必修128例-克里斯托弗-Christoph-Durr/dp/B078SJQPVK "High-efficiency algorithm competitions 128 examples", did he write it the Chinese himself?? Must be of course to complement the notoriously low French professor salaries), made it available, and then Ciro gave him back the .tex file. Ciro was just a bit worried about how the teacher would be able to tell what he had changed in the file to validate the change. The teacher just said of course, "no problem, I'll just use
diff". Ciro had never heard of diff. Let alone Git of course, though yes, this was a bit early in Git's history version control systems had been around since forever of course. This was 2011 or 2012, about 4 or 5 years into a superior education curricula with various courses involving computers, some requiring quite a lot of "fill these empty functions" style programming. Education is a joke. Anyways, this was a prelude to exactly what Ciro wanted to do in OurBigBook.com. This might have been the one actually: webia.lip6.fr/~durrc/Iut/Notes580.pdfNot long afterwards, Ciro started playing with Linux. Until then, Ciro had had some contacts with the mysterious operating system at university, and was a bit puzzled what the point of it was! He clearly remembers:University should be forced to use only open source software and hardware in undergrad teaching courses by law BTW.
- at the University of São Paulo that they had some "UNIX" computers in some classes, and at the library
- at École Polytechnique, he took a course about mathematical analysis and there was a "lab" where students were supposed to use FreeFem, great initiative BTW. And Ciro distinctly remembers being paried with a nice Chilian colleague, and the guy was alreay super at ease with the shell: "cd", "ls", etc. WTF was all that!
Then came an Ubuntu live disk on his own machine, and finally a measly 40GB dual book partition in a Microsoft Windows machine on a laptop. At first, it took a lot of time to learn all the crazy new terminal stuff! Yes, at this point, Ubuntu was already usable enough without the terminal, an accomplishment actually. But as a programmer, Ciro felt obliged to learn. Many hours were spent reading man pages at the library. But it all just felt so right, and sometimes powerful... true wizardry.
And ten years later, Ciro was seriously considering buying a computer without Windows pre-installed. He had not used Windows a single tie on a personal machine even once in those ten years!
Finally, to finish things off Ciro found two websites that changed his life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.
The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.
Ciro Santilli distinctly remembers being taught that at basic electrical engineering school during Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo.
It really allows you to do alternating current calculations much as you'd do DC calculations with resistors, quite poweful. It must have been all the rage in the 1950s.
Ciro Santilli lived in Santos from about the year 1998 to 2007, with a 10 month hiatus in Coventry, UK, until he went to the University of São Paulo.
Santos is the nearest beach city to São Paulo City, and for this reason:
- the largest port of Latin America in 2018, through which large chunks of the precious coffee export exited Brazil in the 19th century. There is a Coffee museum in Santos.This importance is also linked to the fact that Santos is one of the oldest european cities in Brazil, being founded in 1546. From this you can infer that it was a good port. One reason for this is obvious if you look at the map of the city: the neighbouring towns of Praia Grande and Guarujá form a large protected bay where ships may safely dock.
- a popular local tourist destination that gets crowded on hot weekends, with the beach line being fully built with tall buildings from the 60's, many of which became incredibly bent due to the inadequate technology used on such soft soil
Ciro idolizes Santos as the perfect location to live nature-wise due to its amazing wide sandy beach, in which Ciro spent endless hours walking on the sand and on the largest beachfront garden in the world (archive), meditating, and playing some soccer after school was over. Santos is also the city where Pelé first played professionally.
Ciro has visited Santos several times after leaving Brazil. Doing this gives him a weird feeling of having a separate life, in which time passes 2 weeks every few years. Of course, as your family grows, it gets harder and harder to go back home, and your family members might want to just go travel to more interesting places than just stay at your wonderful beach which you love in part due to nostalgia.
Ciro is also fond of the concept of the small public buildings near the beach garden (postos de praia), which serve different cultural activities: library, comic book store, art cinema, surf school. It is such a shame that the library and comic book ones are in such bad shape as of 2020, old books and poor people who go there to sleep a bit in the barely working air conditioning. Ciro fantasizes how those could instead be cultural hubs for the gathering of the brightest artists, and scientists, of town. Maybe they are just too small. Maybe it is not within the realm of possibility of public service. Maybe, we should focus instead in the poorer regions, far form the beach. But the dream remains.
Santos only has one natural defect: mosquitoes. By the sea it is fine because the wind is strong, and they don't like salt water. But anywhere else, you will be eaten alive, and maybe get dengue, Ciro got it once. Gene drive, please.
This instagram page has several drone videos of the region: www.instagram.com/malta.drone
Canal 5 on the beach by VicTrindade (2017)
Source. This is one of Santos 7 old canals, which are still in use and serve to reduce floodings in the city, which are caused by the strong tropical rains that fall on the city. This is particularly important to keep the mosquito population under some control. All canals were built in the first third of the 20th century, except canal 7 which is from 1968[ref]. The canals have normally very shallow water when it is not raining, and since it is rain water they are basically clean. There are other canals which are/were used for sewage, but then are not open air. The canals now serve as handy reference points and practical avenues in town, as well as being surrounded with nice trees that provide shade and drop small inedible purple fruit that will stain your car for all eternity. They do scar the beach line a bit it must be said, but it's part of the charm of the city, and they serve as good reference points for runners.
Communicating at a distance, from Greek "tele" for distance!
A very cool thing about telecommunication is, besides how incredibly fast it advanced (in this sense it is no cooler than integrated circuit development), how much physics and information theory is involved in it. Applications of telecommunication implementation spill over to other fields, e.g. some proposed quantum computing approaches are remarkably related to telecommunication technology, e.g. microwaves and silicon photonics.
This understanding made Ciro Santilli wish he had opted for telecommunication engineering when he was back in school in Brazil. For some incomprehensible reason, telecommunications was the least competitive specialization in the electric engineering department at the time, behind even power electronics. This goes to show both how completely unrelated to reality university is, and how completely outdated Brazil is/was. Sad stuff.