Futility Closet

Euler’s Identity

Posted in Science & Math by Greg Ross on July 15th, 2007

You know these numbers:

constants

On the surface they appear unrelated. e concerns natural logarithms, i is imaginary, π concerns circles. But, amazingly:

Euler's identity

Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce told a class, “It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.”