Skip to main content

[Community Question] Calculus: Why is Euler's number 2.718 and not any thing else?

One of our user asked:

Why is Euler's number $\mathtt 2.71828$ and not for example $\mathtt 3.7589$ ???

I know that e is the base of natural logarithms, I know about areas on hyperbola xy=1 and I know it's formula : $$e =\sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{1}{n!}$$
And I also know it has many other characterizations.
But, why is e equal to that formula (which sum is approximately $\mathtt 2.71828$) ???
I googled that many times and every time it ends in having "e is the base of natural logarithms",
I don't want to work out any equations using e without understanding it perfectly.

Thanks in advance.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

[Community Question] Linear-algebra: non-negative matrix satisfying two conditions

One of our user asked: A real matrix $B$ is called non-negative if every entry is non-negative. We will denote this by $B\ge 0$ . I want to find a non-negative matrix $B$ satisfying the following two conditions: (1) $(I-B)^{-1}$ exists but not non-negative. Here $I$ is the identity matrix. (2) There is a non-zero and non-negative vector $\vec{d}$ such that $(I-B)^{-1}\vec{d}\ge 0$ . I tried all the $2\times 2$ matrices, but it did not work. I conjecture that such a $B$ does not exist, but don't know how to prove it.

[Community Question] Geometry: The limit about the line connecting the intersection of a circle and the $y$-axis and the intersection of the shrinking circle and a fixed circle

One of our user asked: There is a fixed circle $C_1$ with equation $(x - 1)^2 + y^2 = 1$ and a shrinking circle $C_2$ with radius $r$ and center the origin. $P$ is the point $(0, r)$ , $Q$ is the upper point of intersection of the two circles, and $R$ is the point of intersection of the line $PQ$ and the $x$ -axis. What happens to $R$ as $C_2$ shrinks, that is, as $r \to 0^+$ ? (The figure is made with GeoGebra ) In order to solve this problem, I made a script using GeoGebra in which the circle $C_2$ is a dynamic one whose radius $r$ can be adjusted with a slider. As I set $r \to 0^+$ , the figure seems to suggest that $R \to (4,0)$ . In particular, this is the state with $r = 0.001$ , in which $R$ is reported to be $(3.9999997523053,0)$ : However, I would like to find out a way to prove (or disprove, though unlikely) my guess that $$\lim_{r \to 0} R = (4,0).$$ But I have little idea. Any help would be appreciated.