Summary
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Euler's number, also known as e. First discovered in the seventeenth century by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli when he was studying compound interest, e is now recognised as one of the most important and interesting numbers in mathematics. Roughly equal to 2.718, e is useful in studying many everyday situations, from personal savings to epidemics. It also features in Euler's Identity, sometimes described as the most beautiful equation ever written.
With:
Colva Roney-Dougal Reader in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews
June Barrow-Green Senior Lecturer in the History of Maths at the Open University
Vicky Neale Whitehead Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford
Producer: Thomas Morris.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
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| 0:45.9 | the program. Hello centuries ago when thinkers started to look at the world around |
| 0:51.5 | them using the language of mathematics, they found |
| 0:54.1 | that a few very important numbers seem to underpin everything. |
| 0:58.0 | Perhaps the best known of these is Pi, the ratio of a circle circumference to its diameter, which is roughly equal to 3.141. |
| 1:06.0 | Less famous but arguably every bit as important is a number studied in the 18th century by |
| 1:10.4 | the great Swiss mathematician and an Euler. He called it E and in honor of him it sometimes |
| 1:16.1 | referred to as E E. begin 2.7828 and continues for an infinite number of decimal places. It's a number that can be found in all |
| 1:26.1 | sorts of surprising places. It crops up in the study of interest rates, electronics and |
| 1:30.5 | radioactive decay. A mathematician would also tell you that it's irrational. and discuss the number known as E, are Colboeroni Dougal, reader in pure mathematics at the University of St Andrews, |
| 1:47.0 | Vicky Neal, Whitehead Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford and June Barrow Green senior lecturer in the history of mathematics at the Open University. |
| 1:58.0 | Colverandadougal, most people come across pie in their maths classes with fewer familiar with E. Would you give us a quick |
| 2:05.5 | summary of what it is? |
| 2:07.5 | Well, as you mentioned in your introduction, E is a number. It's a number between two and three that begins with 2.7, it goes on forever. |
| 2:16.0 | But what's important about E, there's two main things. The first is that it's a number that just pops |
... |
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