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Comment by adunk | Hacker News Reader

For everyone that, like me, like to read only the headline and then proceed directly into the comments:

The title of the link currently is "Why E, the Transcendental Math Constant, Is Just the Best".

But the article really is about Euler's constant - the lower case e - and not about any of the capital E:s out there (like the capital E sometimes used in scientific notation, or the expected value in probability theory).

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This was probably the result of HN's autocapitalisation of post titles. The title of the article itself uses lowercase e. In any case, the title has been changed now.

See what happens when you're so smart you get multiple things named after you?

This is not the e you know and love from school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_constant

This one is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)

Worth coming up with some better way to talk about this.

The first one is usually (at least from what I've seen) called the Euler–Mascheroni constant which is denoted by γ, so I don't think there is much confusion.

Euler was much more than smart. The man went home during the Black Plague and studied math so hard he went blind in one eye - presumably so his brain could use those neurons for math instead of sight. He was also discredited in his time and for centuries after for an intuitive understanding of calculus through infinitesimal and infinite numbers - which was only relatively recently put into rigor akin to epsilon-delta calculus. Also considered the last person to be able to know all of the known world of mathematics at his point in time.

I kind of wish we had a holiday of some kind to appreciate either Euler himself or even a month to discuss the historical contributions to knowledge by philosophers and scientists alike.

> I kind of wish we had a holiday of some kind to appreciate either Euler himself or even a month to discuss the historical contributions to knowledge by philosophers and scientists alike.

My math teacher from high school, who I still keep in touch with, sends out a reminder every April 15th.

You should come to Stockholm, Sweden, during the week at the beginning of December when the Nobel prizes are awarded. While it is not an entire month of celebrations in the name of science, at least it is one full week: https://www.nobelprize.org/ceremonies/nobel-week-2021/

To any person interested in understanding calculus through infinitesimal and infinite numbers, see: https://people.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html

> See what happens when you're so smart you get multiple things named after you?

Yes, this problem is touched on in the Wikipedia "List of Things named after Leonhard Euler" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leo...)

I particularly like the remark in the introduction:

> In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler.

Are either of the latter transcendental constants

Yeah the title almost seemed like clickbait since "Euler's constant" usually means γ=0.5772... provoking a reaction of "where does that show up in optimization?". That the constant turned out to be e=2.718... which shows up all over the place was a big disappointment

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