Fall in love with e all over again.
Rekindle the magic with everyone’s favourite transcendental. (Sorry, π.)
Euler’s constant, e, doesn’t get the attention it deserves. While other mathematical constants get fancy Greek (or even Hebrew) letters, e needs to settle with a simple — well — e. Let’s take a journey into the inner workings of e to see what makes it tick.
Stuff changes. It gets bigger. It gets smaller. Exponential growth (or decay) is the change where the rate depends on the quantity we’re measuring. Take, for example, a Blob from outer space. It consumes everything in its path. As it does so, it gets bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it eats.
We can talk about the Blob’s doubling time. “It doubles in size every hour!” Inherent in that statement is the notion that its rate of growth depends upon its current size.
We commonly compare growth rates this way:
