e-day - A mathematical holiday celebrated on February 7th

e-day - A mathematical holiday celebrated on February 7th
2018년 2월 7일

Today, February 7th, 2018, is called e-day because e is approximately 2.718, and this date is written 2/7/18 in some parts of the world.

e, also called Euler’s Number after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, is a very important constant that comes up in many different places in mathematics. The numer e was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli while studying compound interest where e arises as the limit of (1 + 1/n)n as n approaches infinity. e can also be calculated by summing:

The constant e appears naturally on the exponential function, which models growth. Hence, the same way that the constant π appears in everything that is round, the number e appears in everything that grows: size of baby animals, leaves in trees, bacteria populations, spreading of diseases, spirals in flowers and snails, radiactive decay of elements, money invested in a bank, processing power of computers… Everything that grows the faster the bigger it is follows an exponential law, and contains the number e.

e has an infinite number of digits. We prepared a website listing the first 60.000 digits of e and help you find your birthday in it:

e-day website

If we assign a number to each letter in the alphabet we can even find your name within the digits of e, along with the complete works of William Shakespeare, the ending of Game of Thrones (spoiler alert), the full text of the Wikipedia from the year 2030 or what you’ll have tomorrow for breakfast…

At least that’s what conjectured: It is conjectured that e is a normal number. In normal numbers every possible sequence of digits of a certain length appears with the same frequency. There are approximately as many 1s as 9s, as many 23s as 42s, as many 0000s as 1111s, etc. So within the infinite digits of a normal number we are able to find any possible sequence of any finite length.

Happy e-day to you!

관련 자료

All News

2013년 4월 2일

Last week Holi was celebrated in India (with a lot of colours) and this week Easter in the Christian world (with equally many colours). Happy celebrations! Easter eggs are very popular within the IMAGINARY team, not the chocolate ones, but the ones you hide within a software program. We hid two Easter eggs in our museum exhibits: one in the MiMa museum in Oberwolfach and one in the MoMath museum in New York. They are...더 보기

2013년 3월 12일

The Italian edition of Scientific American, Le Science, has published a very nice piece by Roberta Fulci about the IMAGINARY platform launch. You can find it here (in Italian). 

Have you seen more articles or references about IMAGINARY in the news? If so,...더 보기

2013년 3월 7일

We are very happy that the user response to the new IMAGINARY platform was so big - too big for our server capacity. Today in the morning we registered 1.3 million accesses on the site (before 11:30 am) and we had to react quickly to shift the website to a new server. This caused several delays and also the platform was not online for about 2 hours. We are very sorry for this! 

Now the platform is up and...더 보기

2013년 2월 10일

On March 5, 2013 the new exhibition “Mathematics of Planet Earth” (MPE) and the new IMAGINARY platform will be launched officially at the MPE UNESCO day. The platform will host the open source exhibition, which will be physically displayed for the first time at UNESCO and remain there until March 8. The venue is...더 보기

2012년 12월 12일

The new Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) will open its doors in Manhattan, New York. “Mathematics illuminates the patterns and structures all around us. Our dynamic exhibits and programs will stimulate inquiry, spark curiosity, and reveal the wonders of mathematics. The Museum will have its grand opening on Saturday, December 15, 2012 at 11 East 26th Street in Manhattan.”

IMAGINARY is present with one exhibit: a...더 보기

페이지