Unmediated Experience, part 2 — another use of primary texts in the math classroom

While gathering problems for my logarithms and exponential functions unit from some of my favorite textbook sources, I noticed that John Napier's birth and death dates (1550-1617) looked kind of familiar — really familiar, in fact.

In fact, they're almost the same as Shakespeare's birth and death dates (1564-1616).

And they're awfully close to Galileo's birth and death dates too (1564-1642).

So why not at least mention the historical context of logarithms?