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Comment on Bernoulli discovered e by studying a question about compound interest

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Here's my "e bookshelf" http://imgur.com/YBB33 , which uses the 1/n! definition. It only goes up to 1/3!, but ideally would approach 1/infinity!. e grows as the total area of the clear books on the left. For example, for the bottom shelf, 1/3! is the same as having all possible arrangements of three objects, and choosing one.

Another nice property of the 1/n! definition is that you can use it to define exponentiation for things which don't have division (e.g. matrices)

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