what is the purpose of the value e?
In: Mathematics
I think some of these responses are missing the point. I would say almost no one cares about the number e, but we end up writing it down anyway so some math students start thinking they should care about its value.
Real ELI5 here: adding numbers is easy, multiplying them is hard. There is a function, called the natural logarithm, which turns multiplying into adding–the hard thing into the easy thing. This is great! But it makes numbers look different, so we want to be able to “undo” this. There is another function, called exp(x) which undoes the natural logarithm. So if you have some complicated mathematical expression to deal with, frequently a good strategy is
A) take the natural log
B) deal with the (now easier to deal with–all multiplication became addition, after all) new expression
C) take the exp() to make it look like the kind of number we started with.
The number e just happens to be what exp(1) is, but there isn’t any reason to expect exp(1) to be a very interesting or important number.
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