An excellent article. Full of things I haven't seen.<p>I will second his recommendation to read original works. They aren't always the best, but in many instances they can teach you a lot more than just the topic at hand. If you have your grammar school science textbooks at one end of the spectrum---nth hand knowledge echoed by an author with no understanding of the subject---then original works are at the opposite end---the idea in its first appearance, recorded by someone with the power necessary to understand and discover it for the first time. The advantage isn't only in that the author takes great pains to present his new discovery, it's in the countless unrepeatable ways he presents it dictated by the climate of his time. Just like there will never be another 17th century Italy to produce those particular violins, there will never be another Victorian Era to produce <i>On the Origin of Species</i>, in the way it was originally written. You can rewrite and distill the idea, but you can't recapture all the implications that originally flowed from it. Reinterpretations strip an idea of its historical context, and frequently these are as important as the idea itself.
There was a nice documentary about the birth of the calculus, that focused on Newton and Leibniz's notebooks. It was cool to see them making up notation on the fly.<p>(A quick check of YouTube finds it here: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwZNg237x1M" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwZNg237x1M</a>)
<i>Robert Recorde wanted to make his math books clear and accessible. He was the first to write such books in English, rather than in the Latin or Greek of the educated elite.</i><p>Also, little more about this subject on the PBS site:<p><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/ance-equals.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/ance-equals.html</a>