>The ‘discovery’ was actually a rediscovery — the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss worked it out in 1805, but he never published it, says Nick Trefethe

>The ‘discovery’ was actually a rediscovery — the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss worked it out in 1805, but he never published it, says Nick Trefethen, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, UK. I wonder what you could come up with if you went through unpublished works of people like Gauss, Ramanujan, Euler, Erdos, etc. There are likely a bunch of stuff that they would have seen as merely an impractical curiosity back then, but that actually might have a lot of use now.