The history of ‘e’ is a tangled one, one which would warrant an entire dedicated book to parse through mathematics to the original conception of the transcendental number. Even before e’s enigmatic beauty was fully unearthed, people using mathematics to solve real world problems encountered the number many times, and understood it enough to work it into their solutions. A good example of this is when e shows up in compound interest. Bankers found out that as the number of times one took annual compound interest grew to infinity, the rate of growth approached e! Watch the video to see two mathematical proofs of our statement, using two definitions of e.
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