> Off the top of my head, Euler, Gauss, Newton, Leibniz, Euclid pretty much cover an undergraduate curriculum and all the math most people would know, and those

> Off the top of my head, Euler, Gauss, Newton, Leibniz, Euclid pretty much cover an undergraduate curriculum and all the math most people would know, and those are just five people. Who just happened to be around at the right time to a certain extent. The fact that these particular people are the famous ones may be an accident of history and someone else would have come along and and produce the same results. Newton and Leibniz (and de Fermat, etc) famously both invented/discovered calculus at the same time: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries#17th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries#1... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery At least when it comes to mathematics, and perhaps 'mechanical' discoveries/inventions; lots of folks fiddling around with boiling water over the course of history, for example: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine Other aspects of human thought may be different: I think Aristotle (and later Thomas Aquinas) were unique and we'd be in a very different place, world-view-wise, if they hadn't been around.