People should read up on Galois theory and the story behind it. It involves a french youth, the french revolution, groundbreaking maths, and tangentially Poisson, Fourier and Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi.
His life should be a movie. :-)
It's always been interesting to me that both Galois and Abel accomplished so much despite dying so young.
Most introductions to Galois theory that I've read have mentioned his duel.
- quaternions maybe have a more interesting backstory than other constructs. Not everything was carved into stone.
- quaternions never really became part of mainstream mathematical education. This makes them more niche and strange, and worth telling a story about. It's not as interesting to tell a story about something commonplace.