>>10569666Read Chace's treatment of the Rhind Papyrus, once. Got Herr Gauß' Disquisitiones Arithmaticae for my birthday recently but haven't cracked it yet, reading other things.
>>10569720This is a fair/tenable statement for the large majority of readers who simply want to learn math efficiently (no one learns classical physics by actually reading Newton's Principia, etc). However there are those of us who are interested in historical documents/history of ideas, apart from the datedness of the content.
>>10569783Specifically, historians care about primary and secondary documents, as opposed to tertiary ones (already-written math histories). You're basically missing the possibility of people who are primarily interested in history as opposed to math itself (otherwise, how is a history of math even written, at some point some scholar has to examine the documents...)
>>10570318>reading Euclid is difficultIt's true that the effective absence of algebra in pre-renaissance math makes things unnecessarily tedious and wordy (true of all such old documents), but if you have a hard time following the /thread of argument/ of a Euclidian proof, you're unironically a brainlet. That's exactly why it was the standard until recently: it's easy to follow along with, and you know what's going to poop out in the end.
