It's an interesting approach. They do like the classic sources. I've at least skimmed more than half of those titles, long after college. It's amusing that they have students read Pikkety's "Capital" before Marx's "Capital".

You don't want to learn geometry from Euclid. You read Euclid after you already know geometry, to see how he built it up. Similarly, you don't want to learn calculus from Newton. Or physics from Aristotle. What you're seeing there is people trying to figure something out before the tools for the job were developed.

There are great papers in engineering, where a theoretical advance changed the world. They're not well known. These should be as well known as the "Great Books".

* Maxwell's paper "On Governors". In a few pages, he invents feedback control theory. People were building steam engine governors but didn't understand stability and lag. It's a milestone in that it's one of the first times abstract math met practical engineering and the result worked.

* Shannon's discovery that telephone toll switches could be reduced from needing O(N^2) relays to O(N log N) was one. Suddenly, combinatorics went from a useless abstraction to a huge financial win for AT&T.

* "Rational Psychrometric Formulae", by Willis Carrier. Least click-bait title ever. Basis of air conditioning. It's how you make an air conditioner and control both temperature and humidity at the cold end, rather than getting cold, humid air out.

* Von Neumann's Report on the EDVAC. That's better known. It's how to make a CPU. He got all the basic architecture right, except for index registers.