Steven Strogatz

@stevenstrogatz.com

13949 Followers 1657 Following

Mathematician, writer, Cornell professor. All cards on the table, face up, all the time. www.stevenstrogatz.com

Schematic image of the Earth, and Table of Contents for Quanta Magazine's special issue about climate science
Prof. Steven Strogatz stands with a group of students from the Brooklyn College Math Club, who proudly show their arms autographed by Prof. Strogatz
Prof. Steven Strogatz stands with a group of ten students from the Brooklyn College Math Club, who all smile as they show Strogatz's signature on their forearms.
The analysis shows that under certain highly simplified assumptions, you should stop playing the field after about 1/e, or 37%, of your dating lifetime.
a final example, showing how e pops up in the question of how many people to date before setting down.
An example showing that e arises in a calculation of packing pairs of people side by side in a theater, if they sit randomly in the available open spaces for two people (as opposed to packing themselves shoulder to shoulder with pairs of people, or always strategically leaving one seat open between pairs). Random packing gives a density of 1/e^2 (in the limit of an infiniteky large theater).
A calculation showing that e arises as a limit of 100% annual interest, if the interest is compounded more and more often over shorter and shorter compounding intervals. This limit is called "continuous compounding."
page 1 of an essay about the number e, arguing that it's everywhere in advanced mathematics, from chain reactions and population booms to how many people you should date before settling down.
graphs of the curves x^n/n! look evenly spaced.