If you're interested in this sort of stuff I highly recommend Stillwell's "Mathematics and it's History" (<a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4419-6053-5" rel="nofollow">https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4419-6053-5</a>) - it's a wonderful mix of quite low level explicit mathematics with contextual history; along with Stewarts "Concept of Mathematics" (<a href="https://archive.org/details/ConceptsofmodernmathematicsStewart1981" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/ConceptsofmodernmathematicsStewa...</a>).<p>When you first study mathematics at undergraduate and early post-grad level there is a sense of being overwhelmed with how on earth anyone figured this out. When you read the messy history of maths, and understand it is an organic, growing field, you feel a little less like an imposter struggling to understand how anyone could've come up with this.<p>Reading these books (primarily as a software engineer), made me feel better about not immediately getting certain concepts, because it's likely the people these theorems are named after didn't get it either, to begin with. They refined it, they collaborated (like a pull request almost) and eventually everything got very neatly packaged up into a set of theorems. Mathematics is rarely taught in that way, I wish more of the "human" aspect was part of the pedagogical process. I think it might temper some of the fear people have.