Fermat's Library Cofounders João Batalha and Luís Batalha

TL;DR

Fermat's Library is a platform for annotating scientific papers, founded by brothers João and Luís Batalha alongside two other co-founders. Their goal is to move science toward open science by enabling collaborative annotation, improving paper discoverability, and eventually building a broader platform for open collaboration.

Key insights

• The co-founders started with an internal journal club where they read and presented papers to each other, which forced deeper understanding; this experience directly inspired Fermat’s Library.
• The first paper annotated on the platform was the Bitcoin paper, which remains the most commented and has been cited by news sites as the canonical annotated version.
• A major unsolved problem is paper discoverability and recommendation; the co-founders note that arXiv's growth has been linear (not exponential) over decades.