A couple of interesting tidbits about the Elements that I've run into:

It had a profound influence on Abraham Lincoln. He said (he was largely an autodidact) that the Elements taught him what it meant to actually know that something was true, or words to that effect.

It's an example of how profoundly the West is indebted to Arabian (sometimes called "Islamic") scholarship. For centuries, the version that Europeans actually studied was a Latin translation of an Arabic translation that Arab scholars made from the original. They rescued much of our Greek heritage this way.