> At least for me, in many cases I have achieved a much better understanding of various things after I studied the historical development of the ideas related to them.
Completely agree with this. Math, and especially related studies like probability/stats, are presented as laws of the universe, when quite often they represent branching paths that could have gone a different way. What we take as correctness is often just one specific metric, or one justifiable epistemological pathway, among many, and it's worth understanding why we ended up where we are, and what those other forking paths might have been, and often still are.
Completely agree with this. Math, and especially related studies like probability/stats, are presented as laws of the universe, when quite often they represent branching paths that could have gone a different way. What we take as correctness is often just one specific metric, or one justifiable epistemological pathway, among many, and it's worth understanding why we ended up where we are, and what those other forking paths might have been, and often still are.