I've had to brush up on a lot of maths recently, and something I've encountered more frequently than expected is history of mathematics and science. What I find so interesting is the sequence of discoveries that leads us to our current understanding, since it often leads to a deeper understanding (I think Schools would have done better to have taught me science history rather than the one-sided view of WWI and WWII that I was subjected to).
The article here discusses the development in understanding of polynomial equations, from the Babylonians, through Greeks, Hindus, Arabs, and Europeans.
It seems that Scholars had to travel to 'hot beds' of intellectual thought, wherever in the world that might be. These days, we use routers and fibre optics to do our travel for us, but without those people who travelled hundreds of miles or more to obsessively seek out the most exciting intellectual challenges, we'd probably not yet have invented the Internet. That's my guess anyway!