July 2013
Intermediate to advanced
282 pages
6h 28m
English
Content preview from Good MathBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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The Number That’s Everywhere
What is e?
e is a transcendental irrational number. It is roughly 2.718281828459045. It’s also the base of the natural logarithm. That means that by definition, if ln(x) = y, then ey = x.
Given my highly warped sense of humor and my love of bad puns (especially bad geek puns), I like to call e the unnatural natural number. It’s natural in the sense that it’s the base of the natural logarithm; but it’s not a natural number according to the usual definition of natural numbers. (Hey, I warned you that it was going to be a bad geek pun!)
But that’s not a sufficient answer. We call it the natural logarithm. Why is a bizarre irrational number that’s just a bit smaller than 2 ¾ considered natural?
The answer becomes ...
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