Izack
Non sequitur
I thought of that this morning, and now feel like quite the idiot. :facepalm:
No more late-night wikipedia-reading after this.
---------- Post added 29-04-11 at 01:41 AM ---------- Previous post was 28-04-11 at 02:07 PM ----------
So much for not thinking too hard late at night.
Out of boredom I tried rediscovering e by implicitly differentiating the function y=e^x when x=0 and dy/dx = 1.
[math]\frac{dy}{dx}=\frac{d}{dx}e^{x}[/math]
So far so good.
Using the power rule on e^x divides by zero at the x-origin, and I'm not in the mood for first-principle, so I'll go with what trusty Wikipedia tells me, which is that the derivative of e^x is e^x.
[math]\frac{dy}{dx}=e^{x}[/math]
dy/dx = 1 here so...
[math]\log_{e}1=x[/math]
x=0 so
[math]e^{0}=1[/math]
Well, duh! Anything to the power of zero is 1. So e could be 2.71828, it could be 42, it could be 8.95e269 or [math]\sqrt{2\pi}[/math].
So how can I find e? Was my reasoning wrong? Am I just stupid? :idk:
the only person left was someone who sits doing nothing.
