OMITTING & MISSING THE OBVIOUS Analogous to the sun being occulted by the moon this month, so too by US history classes that the sole author of the "Rough Draught" of the Declaration of Independence was the only astronomer to have been president. Astronomy duly tops the list of natural sciences recommended by him (but even so, only appearing after topics in mathematics) in a letter to a prospective college student asking for advice on what courses to take. His meticulous observation of the solar eclipse of 1811 (on the 24th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, no less) helped show that the builders of the Capitol missed the target of placing the rotunda exactly at 77 degrees West by 1% of a degree of longitude. Earlier while president, "Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document." (as described by Carl Sagan - web.archive.org/web/20210227103455/atheists-for-jesus.com/paul.php - in a letter to Ken Schei, author of An Atheist for Jesus). Accordingly, he called related doctrinal obstacles to common sense "priestcraft." Lancelot Hogben, echoing such disdain for astronomical priestcraft in his book Mathematics for the Million, harkens back to a much earlier heyday than Catholicism's vis-a-vis Egyptian priests occulting the slightly out-of-sync correlation between the Nile's flooding & their calendar - being just 365 days long. So when Ptolemy III issued the Decree of Canopus that called for a leap day every 4 years, the priests ignored it. His innovation was nonetheless commemorated by astronomers (as was his wife: the constellation Coma Berenices was named after her) by commencing the Old Style calendar year on the 25th of March, the 1st day of spring in Egypt when he was pharao. Consequently, most of my units for Upward Bound's inaugural astronomy curriculum in Los Angeles County (having been started up in other subjects at Harbor College, hence my unit on tides) dealt with the seasons & positional astronomy. That was in the 1980s when I was fortunate in happening upon a supervisor who appreciated that I was interested in doing for astronomy what Hogben did for mathematics. It was in such spirit that I made a pitch to the mathematics chair at Harvey Mudd College. He was the supervisor for developing the astronomy curriculum (rather than their professor of astrophysics as one would expect), and, after listening to "my" Grand Unified Theory on how the units should be taught, looked at me quizzically and said: "That sounds like Hogben!" So I had to admit: "That's where I got the idea from." In said book, Hogben writes: "The customary way of writing a book about mathematics is to show how each step follows logically from the one before without telling you what use there will be in taking it. This book is written to show how each step follows historically from the step before and what use it will be . . . . As mathematics has been taught and expanded in schools, no effort is made to show its social history, its signficance in our own lives, the immense dependence of civilized mankind upon it . . . . What is rarely explained to us is that it may have taken the human race a thousand years to see that one step in a mathematical argument is 'obvious'." .. . or two thousand in the case of Sundaram who published his prime number Sieve less than 100 years ago (which, due to its obscurity, can still be pawned off on the general public in McCanney's self-published book Calculate Primes as if a new & improved method of his own). Obvious optimisations to the earlier Sieve of the classical astronomer who measured the earth's polar circumference are included, yet it omits a fundamental feature of Eratosthenes' Sieve (line 50 in the prior computer program at the link). Otherwise, a mundane [(L+1)(L-1)/2 <=> (2O+2)O] transfiguration is all that's required to convert between programs for both of their Sieves: www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes#Sieve_of_Sundaram - which took almost a century for someone to notice this stepping stone between them.