Memorising formulas or deriving them?

The problem is that people are born just as dumb as they have always been but the bar keeps getting raised higher and higher on how much they have to learn to keep their heads above water.

Good point, but in some circumstances (like when I feel lazy) it's just easier to pin responsibility onto a specific individual for things that were actually the result of various important contributors. Newton did not personally discover any one of the three laws, and some people think SR should be called The Einstein/Lorentz Theory. "The Galileo/Royal Society/Euler Laws of Motion" is a bit unwieldy. Euclid, likewise, was merely a collector and editor of centuries of prior knowledge from all over the ancient world, but "Euclid's Elements" has a nice, compact ring to it.

Actually i think in that fashion SR should be called Lorentz/Fitzgerald/Poincare/Einstein theory :).
But I think you should give more credit to Euclid for Elements. Not only did he contribute with lot of proves (if I'm not mistaken), but he invented the first axiomatic system with it.

Euclid, likewise, was merely a collector and editor of centuries of prior knowledge from all over the ancient world, but "Euclid's Elements" has a nice, compact ring to it.