Mathematics and Its History

One of the disappointments experienced by most mathematics students is that they never get a course in mathematics. They get courses in calculus, algebra, topology, and so on, but the division of labor in teaching seems to prevent these different topics from being combined into a whole. In fact, some of the most important and natural questions are stifled because they fall on the wrong side of topic boundary lines. Algebraists do not discuss the fundamental theorem of algebra because "that's ana