Man's reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of the actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently, it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.

The categories of bourgeois economy consists of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Vol. I) [1867]

really liking the new Paul Reitter translation of Marx

Fun

The world is our mother: The outside world is "the mother's body in an extended sense." (Melanie Klein). "If you have chanced to wonder at the frequency with which landscapes are used in dreams to symbolize the female sexual organs, you may learn from mythologists how large a part has been played in the ideas and cults of ancient times by 'Mother Earth' and how the whole conception of agriculture was determined by this symbolism." "From mythology and poetry we may take towns, citadels, castles and fortresses to be further symbols for women." Jerusalem, "a City, yet a Woman."

Love's Body

"And now I am eager to die into the deathless.
Into the audience hall by the fathomless abyss
where swells up the music of toneless strings
I shall take this harp of my life.
I shall tune it to the notes of forever,
and when it has sobbed out its last utterance,
lay down my silent harp at the feet of the silent."

Rabindranath Tagore

This paper from Weil, presented at the 1979's Conference of the International Congress of Mathematics, is one of the finest papers to read on the importance of having a thorough understanding of history of mathematics. It is terrible that most of those who have been doing mathematics in recent times, have not been exposed to the history, nor do they learn the importance of it. As Weil quotes Leibniz in the paper:
Its use is not just that History my give everyone his due and that others may look forward to similar praise, but also that the art of discovery be promoted and its method known through illustrious examples.

This is crucial for a working mathematician in any field, and all of the prominent mathematicians, including Weil and the Bourbakis, had a good understanding of the history. I specifically blame the curriculum in K-12 and undergraduate courses, that either do not have an emphasis on history nor present the methods through an historical pedagogy. I believe one would only be limited to knowing a concept through the merely reduced caricatures of others in standard reference textbooks, until one dares open the original texts. And indeed, one should do this all the way back to the Greeks, from Archimedes through Euler, Gauss, Galois and the 20th century mathematicians

Not only does one appreciate mathematics better with a historical outlook, one appreciates the connections and dialogues of mathematics with other foundational fields such as logic, philosophy and physics. And as is apparent to anyone who has picked a math book from the 1800s and 2020s, the latter ones have no emphasis on these dialogues. It shows mathematics as some isolated study focused on these obscure objects, but if you had a background in Philosophy of Math, you could ask and read about the answers on why these objects are understood in a certain way, why do we understand the principle of induction in this particular manner? Similarly, the delightful intersections between physics and mathematics obviously are the richest.

I argue that without a historical outlook, one remains limited to doing meaningful contemporary research in any area of mathematics. As the number theorist and historian of mathematics Harold Edwards says in his paper *Read the Masters!:

Mathematics, like philosophy, is virtually inseparable from its history.*

André Weil, History of Mathematics: Why and How (1978)

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as AI, is in fact, Generative AI, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Gen/AI. AI is not a wasteful grift unto itself, but rather another particular subfield of a larger field of AI, made useful by the low-cost motion detection, OCR utilities and other vital technologies used everywhere for a long time. Many people use many AI systems every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of AI which is widely used today is often called “AI”, and many curious individuals are not aware that it is basically only the Gen/AI system which is a highly marketed grift. There really is a Gen/AI, and these marketing victims and grifters people are using it, but it is just a part of the much broader field of AI. Gen/AI is the one people take issue with: the subset of AI wasting tons of money, energy and other vital resources for little to no real-world benefit. Gen/AI is an essential part of the field of AI, but the most useless one; it can only cast shadow on the many AI systems we use every day that are energy-efficient solutions for real-world problems. Gen/AI is regularly criticised under the name of just "AI", but all the so-called "AI" systems are really just Gen/AI systems.