Incoming links: Nobel Prize
Check out: OurBigBook.com, the best way to publish your scientific knowledge. It's an open source note taking system that can publish from lightweight markup files in your computer both to a multi-user mind melding dynamic website, or as a static website. It's like Wikipedia + GitHub + Stack Overflow + Obsidian mashed up. Source code: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook.
Sponsor me to work on this project. For 200k USD I will quit my job or not get a new job and work on OurBigBook full time for a second year to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. Status: ~44k / 200k USD. At 2M USD I retire and work on open STEM forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I first quit my job 1st June 2024 to work on the project for 1 year after I reached my initial 100k goal mostly via a 1000 Monero donation. For a second follow up year, I increased my requirement to 200k USD to give me more peace of mind. So the total donation so far is 144k, and if I reach a total of 300k USD, then I'll work on the project for a second year. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I improved my tech, year two I come guns blazing to solve courses and expand further.
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous. More rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
Explaining things is my superpower, e.g. I was top user #39 on Stack Overflow in 2023[ref][ref] and I have a few 1k+ star educational GitHub repositories[ref][ref][ref][ref]. Now I want to bring that level of awesomeness to masters level Mathematics and Physics. But I can't do it alone! So I created OurBigBook.com to allow everyone to work together towards the perfect book of everything.
My life's goal is to bring hardcore university-level STEM open educational content to all ages. Sponsor me at github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli starting from 1$/month so I can work full time on it. Further information: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". Achieving what I call "free gifted education" is my Nirvana.
This website is written in OurBigBook Markup, and it is published on both cirosantilli.com (static website) and outbigbook.om/cirosantilli (multi-user OurBigBook Web instance). Its source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io and also at
cirosantilli.com/_dir and it is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted.To contact Ciro, see: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". He likes to talk with random people of the Internet.
GitHub | Stack Overflow | LinkedIn | YouTube | Twitter | Wikipedia | Zhihu 知乎 | Weibo 微博 | Other accounts
Besides that, I'm also a freedom of speech slacktivist and recreational cyclist. I like Chinese traditional music and classic Brazilian pop. Opinions are my own, but they could be yours too. Tax the rich.
Let's create an educational system with:
- no distinction between university and high school, students just go as fast as they can to what they really want without stupid university entry exams
- fully open source learning material
- on-demand examinations that anyone can easily take without prerequisites
- granular entry selection only for space in specific laboratories or participation in specific novel research projects
I offer:
- online private tutoring for:
- any STEM university course
- passionate younger STEM students (any age) who want to learn university level material and beyond. Can your kid be the next Fields Medalist or Nobel Prize winner? I'm here to help, especially if you are filthy rich! I focus moving students forward as fast as they want on and on producing useful novel tutorials and results
Let your child be my Emile, and me be their Adolfo Amidei, and let's see how far they can go! I will help take your child:and achieve their ambitious STEM goals!- into the best universities
- into the best PhD programs
- educational consulting for institutions looking to improve their STEM courses
- do you know that course or teacher that consistently gets bad reviews every year? I'll work with the teacher to turn the problem around!
- are you looking to create a consistent open educational resources offering to increase your institutions internationally visibility? I can help with that too.
My approach is to:For minors, parents are welcome to join video calls, and all interactions with the student will be recorded and made available to parents.
- propose interesting research projects. The starting point is always deciding the end goal: Section "Backward design"
- learn what is needed to do the project together with the student(s)
- publish any novel results or tutorials/tools produced freely licensed online, and encourage the student to do the same (Section "Let students learn by teaching", digital garden)
I have a proven track of explaining complex concepts in an interesting and useful way. I work for the learner. Teaching statement at: Section "How to teach". Pricing to be discussed. Contact details at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli".
I am particularly excited about pointing people to the potential next big things, my top picks these days are:I am also generally interested in:
- 20th century physics, notably AMO and condensed matter
- the history of science, and in particular trying to look at seminal papers of a field
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro contributes almost exclusively by answering question he Googles into out of his own need, and never by refreshing the newest question of big tags for low hanging fruit! More information at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions".
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats
. Further methodology details at: Figure "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats".Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source. OurBigBook Web topics demo
. Source. The OurBigBook topic feature allows users to "merge their minds" in a "sort by upvote"-stack overflow-like manner for each subject. This is the killer feature of OurBigBook Web. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-topics.OurBigBook dynamic article tree demo
. Source. The OurBigBook dynamic tree feature allows any of your headers to be the toplevel h1 header of a page, while still displaying its descendants. SEO loves this, and it also allows users to always get their content on the correct granularity. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree.OurBigBook local editing and publishing demo
. Source. With OurBigBook you can store your content as plaintext files in a Lightweight markup, and then publish that to either OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features, or as a static website where you are in full control. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/publish-your-content.Top Down 2D continuous game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)
Source. More information: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games". This is Ciro's underwhelming stab at the fundamental question: Can AGI be trained in simulations?. This project could be taken much further.
My Bitcoin inscription museum by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Introductory video to Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain". -------------------------------------
| Force of Will 3 U U |
| --------------------------------- |
| | //////////// | |
| | ////() ()\////\ | |
| | ///_\ (--) \///\ | |
| | ) //// \_____///\\ | |
| | ) \ / / / / | |
| | ) / \ | | / _/ | |
| | ) \ ( ( / / / / \ | |
| | / ) ( ) / ( )/( ) \ | |
| | \(_)/(_)/ /UUUU \ \\\/ | | |
| .---------------------------------. |
| Interrupt |
| ,---------------------------------, |
| | You may pay 1 life and remove a | |
| | blue card in your hand from the | |
| | game instead of paying Force of | |
| | Will's casting cost. Effects | |
| | that prevent or redirect damage | |
| | cannot be used to counter this | |
| | loss of life. | |
| | Counter target spell. | |
| `---------------------------------` |
| l
| Illus. Terese Nelsen |
-------------------------------------Code 1. .
Artist unknown, uploaded December 2014. Part of Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" where Ciro Santilli maintains a curated list of such interesting inscriptions.
This was a small project done by Ciro for artistic purposes that received some attention due to the incredible hype surrounding cryptocurrencies at the time. Ciro Santilli's views on cryptocurrencies are summarized at: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?".
YellowRobot.jpgJPG image fully embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain depicting some kind of cut material art depicting a yellow robot, inscribed on January 29, 2017.
Ciro Santilli found this image and others during his research for Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" by searching for image fingerprints on every transaction payload of the blockchain with a script.
The image was uploaded by EMBII, co-creator of the AtomSea & EMBII upload mechanism, which was responsible for a large part of the image inscriptions in the Bitcoin blockchain.
The associated message reads:This is one of Ciro Santilli's favorite AtomSea & EMBII uploads, as it perfectly encapsules the "medium as an art form" approach to blockchain art, where even non-novel works can be recontextualized into something interesting, here depicting an opposition between the ephemeral and the immutable.
Chiharu [EMBII's Japanese wife] and I found this little yellow robot while exploring Chicago. It will be covered by tar or eventually removed but this tribute will remain. N 41.880778 E -87.629210
At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1615389973343268871 EMBII announced that he would be giving off shares of that image on Sup!?, a Bitcoin-backed NFT system he was; making. In December 2023, he gave some shares of the robot to Ciro Santilli.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
. This website was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites, a covert system the CIA used to communicate with its assets. More details at: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites".
Ciro Santilli had some naughty OSINT fun finding some of the websites of this defunct network in 2023 after he heard about the 2022 Reuters report on the matter, which for the first time gave away 7 concrete websites out of a claimed 885 total found. As of November 2023, Ciro had found about 350 of them.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of noticiasmusica.net
. This is another website that was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. This website is written in Brazilian Portuguese, and therefore suggests that the CIA had assets in Brazil at the time, and thus was spying on a "fellow democracy".
Although Snowden's revelations made it extremely obvious to the world that the USA spies upon everyone outside of the Five Eyes, including fellow democracies, it is rare to have such a direct a concrete proof of it visible live right on the Wayback Machine. Other targeted democracies include France, Germany, Italy and Spain. More details at: USA spying on its own allies.
Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)
Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.
Used in the Stack Exchange answer to What is the intuition behind normal subgroups? One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel by Ciro Santilli (2021)
Used in the Stack Exchange ansewr to Does faster than light travel imply travelling back in time?. One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Average insertion time into heaps, binary search tree and hash maps of the C++ standard library by Ciro Santilli (2015)
Source. Used in the Stack Overflow answer to Heap vs Binary Search Tree (BST). One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
. Source. This is Ciro Santilli's hand on the Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Nanopore_Technologies. He put it there after working a bit on Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it" :-) And he would love to document more experiments like that one Section "Videos of all key physics experiments", but opportunities are extremely rare.A quick 2D continuous AI game prototype for reinforcement learning written in Matter.js, you can view it on a separate page at cirosantilli.com/_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport. This is a for-fun-only prototype for Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, C++ or maybe Python (for the deep learning ecosystem) seems inevitable for a serious version of such a project. But it is cute how much you can do with a few lines of Matter.js!
HTML snippet:
<iframe src="_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport" width="1000" height="850"></iframe>The fact that ATP is the universal energy storage mollecule of all life on Earth is such an incredible unifying principle of biology!
It is the direct output of all the major forms of "energy generation" in cells: ATP synthesis mechanism.
It is just as fundamental as the genetic code for example.
No wonder dozens of Nobel Prizes were related to its discovery, given its complexity.
By Zuckerberg. The selection seems decent. And natural sciences only, which is good. A bit more application oriented than the Nobel Prize it seems, e.g. 2022 separates physics and fundamental physics.
Appears to explain award reasoning even worse than the Nobel Foundation.
2009 Nobel Prize lecture
. Poor Charles was too debilitated by Alzheimer's disease to give the talk himself! But if you've got a pulse, you can get the prize, so all good.Chemistry is fun. Too hard for precise physics (pre quantum computing, see also quantum chemistry), but not too hard for some maths like social sciences.
And it underpins biology.
100 Greatest Discoveries - Chemistry by the Discovery Channel (2005)
Source. Pretty good within what you can expect from popular science. The discovery selection is solid, and he interviews 3 Nobel Prize laureates, only one about stuff they invented, so you can see their faces. The short non-precise scenes of epoch are also pleasing. Part of 100 Greatest Discoveries by the Discovery Channel (2004-2005).The Royal Society's Nobel Prize.
royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/awards/copley-medal/ says it is now open to international citizens, but having a quick look at the 2010 awards still suggests that it is very British centric, or at least anglophone centric, much like the society fellowship itself. That's likely the reason why the Nobel prize won, being much more international from the start.
This is the one where French Nobel Prizes come from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supérieure_people#Nobel_laureates
The Nobel Prize of mathematics!
That 15,000 canadian dollar prize though, what a joke! That's what you get when an impoverished scientist, and not a rich industrialist, creates a prize!
This technique is crazy! It allows to both:You actually see discrete peaks at different minute counts on the other end.
- separate gaseous mixtures
- identify gaseous compounds
It is based on how much the gas interacts with the column.
Detection is usually done burning the sample to ionize it when it comes out, and then you measure the current produced.
The procedure remind you a bit of gel electrophoresis, except that it is in gaseous phase.
Gas chromatography by Quick Biochemistry Basics (2019)
Source. How I invented the electron capture detector interview with James Lovelock by Web of Stories (2001)
Source. He mentions how scientists had to make their own tools during the 40s/60s. Then how gas chromatography was invented at the National Institute for Medical Research and gained a Nobel Prize. Lovelock came in improving the detection part of things.Ciro once read that there are two types of mathematicians/scientists (he thinks it was comparing Einstein to some Jack of all trades polymath who didn't do any new discoveries):
- high flying birds, who know a bit of everything, feel the beauty of each field, but never dig deep in any of them
- gophers, who dig all the way down, on a single subject, until they either get the Nobel Prize, or work on the wrong problem and waste their lives
TODO long after Ciro forgot where he had read this from originally, someone later pointed him to: www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf Birds and Frogs by Freeman Dyson (2009), which is analogous but about Birds and Frogs. So did Ciro's memory play a trick on him, or is there also a variant; of this metaphor with a gopher?
Ciro is without a doubt the bird type. Perhaps the ultimate scientist is the one who can combine both aspects in the right amount?
Ciro gets bored of things very quickly.
Once he understands the general principles, if the thing is not the next big thing, Ciro considers himself satisfied without all the nitty gritty detail, and moves on to the next attempt.
In the field of mathematics for example, Ciro is generally content with understanding cool theorem statements. More generally, one of Ciro's desires is for example to understand the significance of each physics Nobel Prize.
This is also very clear for example after Ciro achieved Linux Kernel Module Cheat: he now had the perfect setup to learn all the Linux kernel shady details but at the same time after all those years he finally felt that "he could do it, so that was enough", and soon moved to other projects.
If Ciro had become a scientist, he would write the best review papers ever, just like in the current reality he writes amazing programming tutorials on Stack Overflow.
Ciro has in his mind an overly large list of subjects that "he feels he should know the basics of", and whenever he finds something in one of those topics that he does not know enough about, he uncontrollably learns it, even if it is not the most urgent thing to be done. Or at least he puts a mention on his "list of sources" about the subject. Maybe everyone is like that. But Ciro feels that he feels this urge particularly strongly. Correspondingly, if a subject is not in that list, Ciro ignores it without thinking twice.
Ciro believes that high flying birds are the type of people better suited for venture capital investment management: you know a bit of what is hot on several fields to enough depth to decide where to place your bets and how to guide them. But you don't have the patience to actually go deeply into any one of them and deal with each individual shit that comes up.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) episode 1 mentions as quoted by the Wikipedia page for Eratosthenes:That's Ciro.
According to an entry in the Suda (a 10th-century encyclopedia), his critics scorned him, calling him beta (the second letter of the Greek alphabet) because he always came in second in all his endeavours.
Incredible that there hasn't been a Nobel Prize for it as of 2022, e.g. as mentioned at: theconversation.com/no-nobel-but-epigenetics-finally-gets-the-recognition-it-deserves-18970
Some old dudes getting another prize in 2016: www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/pioneers-epigenetics-awarded-horwitz-prize
The Story of John Bardeen at the University of Illinois (2010)
Source. - youtu.be/OyV8qSwGUHU?t=976 of when Bardeen demoed the transistor in class is particularly memorable
- youtu.be/OyV8qSwGUHU?t=1105 some of his golf colleagues didn't know he had won a Nobel Prize!
- youtu.be/OyV8qSwGUHU?t=1260 good jokes about receiving the second Nobel Prize
Congratulations on the second prize. With the third you get to keep the king!
The king asked my mother [Bardeen's son speaking]: "Where's he family"? The mother answered: "Well, they're at home or school". And the kind replied: "Well, next time, bring them!"
Fun fact, in 2024 Ciro Santilli corrected John's place of birth on hist Nobel Prize page: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2002/sulston/facts/, details: Getting a list of all currencies from Wikidata with SPARQL.
John Sulston in 2008
. Source. 
Molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo Updated 2025-02-26 +Created 1970-01-01
Good Portuguese overview: www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1806-11172017000300301&lng=pt&tlng=pt
A fantastic sounding full time 4-year course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural science topics, notably mathematics, physics, chemistry and molecular biology.
Many past students Ciro talked to however share a common frustration with the course: in the first 2 years at least, the "basic cycle", you have infinitely many courses, and no time to study, and no choice of what to study, it is only in the latter 2 years (the advanced cycle) that you get the choices.
Also, if you get low grades in a single subject, your out. And exams are useless of course.
Here's a Quora question in Portuguese about the course: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP, the only decent answer so far being: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP/answer/Victor-Soares-31. Very disappointing to hear.
On the advanced cycle, you have a lot of academic freedom. You are basically supposed to pick a research project with an advisor and go for it, with a small amount of mandatory course hours. Ciro was told in 2022 that you can even have advisors from other universities or industry, and that it is perfectly feasible to take courses in another university and validate the course hours later on. Fantastic!!!
Students from the entire University of São Paulo can apply to transfer to it only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they don't adapt to the new course, which is great!
Not doing it is one of Ciro Santilli's regrets in life, see also: don't be a pussy.
Around 2007, they were in a really shady building of the University, but when Ciro checked in 2021, they had apparently moved to a shiny new entrepreneurship-focused building. Fantastic news!!!
One of the Brazilians who came to École Polytechnique together with Ciro was from this course. The fact that he is one of the most intelligent people Ciro knows gave further credit to that course in his eyes.
Paul's bastardness is more striking than his Nobel Prize and that is awesome.
Family Trees Can Be Dangerous by Paul Nurse
. Source. Fantastic video of Paul describing his bastard story. What a legend. He speaks very well.Understand and explain amazingly every single Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry and biology. Since in particular the Nobel Foundation is unable to do that for any at all, especially of the key old ones, e.g. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/summary/. Hopeless.
To be fair, those in theoretical physics at least basically come down to reading a bunch of books. But perhaps anything slightly more experimental could have