JS, you must be a genius to be able to read and understand the original works of those people. I once looked at some of the original works by Riemann and Euler, and I couldn

The coolest thing about looking at the original work is that you get to see the reasoning processes of some of the worlds gretest thinkers.

Kant worked out the idea that those swirly nebula in the sky were actually galaxies swarming with stars and that our own sun was part of one. He did this by pure reasoning in the 17th century- 200 years before that idea was accepted and proven by observation.

You are right, some of their math looks like a recipe for Klingon biscuits. Maxwell's equations look like heiroglyphics. I found a paper in which a mathematician translated the math into modern symbols.

What I really like about the old papers is that the equations are actually DERIVED- something that I never saw in my undergraduate classes. I think this a HUGE missing piece in American mathematical education.

When you see an equation derived, you OWN it. You've seen how it works from the inside out and there is no fear anymore. You also learn a LOT about how math really works seeing it done. Instead of the abstracts of (a, and (x,y), seeing an equation derived puts dimension where there was only abstracts.

Oh- just so our young friends here think math is just for people with umpteen degrees, Lord Kelvin, the inventer of thermodynamics, entered Glasgow University at the tender age of 10 and published a very important paper when he was 16.

JS

There are very few examples like that of kids that are bourn with such a gift that they make significant contributions to math at early age. Gauss is one of my favorite.

But what concerns me as a college teacher is the average kid and the kind of math education that he gets in high school. I find it absolutely frustrating that my students don't know fractions. They come to my class after taking some basic calculus, which is a prerequisite, but shockingly, some of them don't know basic high school algebra, solving systems of equations, and even fractions and percentages.

I guess I am off topic, and I am just venting my frustrations. Sorry