Gauss said.............you have no idea how much poetry there is in a table of logarithms............Riemann was trying to calculate the square root of 2...........out as far as he could........looking for patterns I bet................








e is the base rate of growth shared by all continually growing processes. e lets you take a simple growth rate (where all change happens at the end of the year) and find the impact of compound, continuous growth, where every nanosecond (or faster) you are growing just a little bit.
e shows up whenever systems grow exponentially and continuously: population, radioactive decay, interest calculations, and more. Even jagged systems that don’t grow smoothly can be approximated by e.
Just like every number can be considered a scaled version of 1 (the base unit), every circle can be considered a scaled version of the unit circle (radius 1), and every rate of growth can be considered a scaled version of e (unit growth, perfectly compounded).
So e is not an obscure, seemingly random number. e represents the idea that all continually growing systems are scaled versions of a common rate.