So Many Birthdays Today! - Blog Posts

Happy Birthday e!

The letter e as the base for natural logarithms was born 25 Nov 1731 in a letter from Euler to Goldbach. e was discovered (but not named) in 1683 by Jacob Bernoulli, as the limit of (1+1/n)^n as n tends to infinity. Prior to its discovery, the nameless constant e had been lurking around the embryo of the logarithm for many years.