Yes ! This is it , thanks . <| sep |> What I ' m saying is that I don ' t need to know about the dude who invented addition to use addition . I don ' t need to know the motivations about the man who invented addition because it ' s pretty well understood , thanks to the knowledge that person helped create . If you need to study specifically addition , read what the latest person has to say about it , not the person with literally the least amount of idea about it . He invented whatever , but then in the next 50 years other people came along and improved and grew the general body of knowledge . Our buddy D dog here was the first caveman to discover fire , why not look to more knowledgeable scientists who studied pyrotechnics their entire lives ? Because it really sounds like you ' re saying he would know more and be able to help the reader better than the scientists who came after , and that sounds like bogus to me . Maybe he is a genius , and no one else can capture the ideas as effectively as the original authors but man do I ever not believe it . You ' re clearly very ignorant about how important it is , because you ' ve admitted you ' ve never really looked into it . Yeah exactly . I ' m not saying it ' s good to be ignorant , but I ' m saying that not knowing something isn ' t always required . In this case I ' m specifically saying you should be learning relevant things . Personally , I don ' t know that reading anything he wrote would help me be better faster than reading something written in the last ten years . That ' s also why I specified that I didn ' t know what I was talking about specifically , to clear up where I ' m coming from .