# Please explain the origin of e

Prudhvi teja
83 Points
12 years ago

Dear srinivas rao

The first references to the constant were published in 1618 in the table of an appendix of a work on logarithms by John Napier. However, this did not contain the constant itself, but simply a list of natural logarithms calculated from the constant. It is assumed that the table was written by William Oughtred. The "discovery" of the constant itself is credited to Jacob Bernoulli, who attempted to find the value of the following expression (which is in fact e):

$e = \lim_{n\to\infty} \left( 1 + \frac{1}{n} \right)^n$

The first known use of the constant, represented by the letter b, was in correspondence from Gottfried Leibniz to Christiaan Huygens in 1690 and 1691. Leonhard Euler started to use the letter e for the constant in 1727 or 1728,and the first use of e in a publication was Euler's Mechanica (1736). While in the subsequent years some researchers used the letter c, e was more common and eventually became the standard.

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Regards,
Prudhvi Teja

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