"I found that the best way for me to internalize a particular subject in hard science is to follow its history by reading the original papers."<p>I've often wondered why math programs (and books) aren't structured this way, explaining the historical context, reproducing the original papers (or explaining the arguments or proofs in the paper if the original happened to be in Latin or whatever), with a section on how the paper helped move the field forward and so on. It doesn't necessarily have to sacrifice rigor to do this, and a s amatter of fact I suspect a "walk the path (taken by the innovators)" approach coupled with strict rigor would make for some awesome books (and get more people interested).