History
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 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):
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 introduced the letter e as the base for natural logarithms, writing in a letter to Christian Goldbach of 25 November 1731. Euler started to use the letter e for the constant in 1727 or 1728, in an unpublished paper on explosive forces in cannons, and the first appearance of e in a publication was Euler's Mechanica (1736).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.
Read more about this topic: e (mathematical Constant)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”
—Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)