What is e (2.718…) and why does it literally appear everywhere?
In: 756
*e* (Napier’s Constant) was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli while studying compound interest.^1
To put it in five year old’s terms, this number is a ratio that you get when you try taking small parts of something, like bank interest, and add them many many times. When you do something like that, taking fractions and doing them a lot, you can see there is some similarity of numbers behaviour. That similarity is often expressed with this ratio number. Just like calculations with circles often involve the number π (3,14159…), e is involved with logarithms and other complicated stuff.
These numbers (e, π, φ…) aren’t magical or made up to create complexity, they describe several relations and patterns in mathematics related to some particular fields.
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^1 This statement is true, the first references to the constant were published in 1618 in the table of an appendix of a work on logarithms by John Napier as a list of logarithms to that base, Bernoulli discovered it in 1683 as a formula describing the constant, Leonhard Euler started to use the letter e for the constant in 1727 or 1728 in an unpublished paper, then used it in a letter to Christian Goldbach in 1731 and first publicised it in Euler’s Mechanica in 1736.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)
EDIT: removed unnecessary talking to the hypothetical five year old.
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