Comment by d-us-vb

From your other responses in this thread, it looks like you do concede that e is useful in symbolic computation, and others use the phraseology "how the function is implemented", which is quite a silly thing to say in a classical math context, but not in a computational context.

I didn't understand immediately that you were talking about using values related to e in a computational context. But your comment about "brainwashing" seems a bit off. Are you saying that programmers bring e and ln with them into code when more effective constants exist for the same end? That's probably true. But brainwashing is far too strong, since things need to be taught in the correct order in math in order for each next topic to make sense. e really only comes in when learning derivative rules where it's explained "e is a number where when used as the base in an exponential function, that function's derivative is itself." Math class makes no pretense that you ought to use any of it to inform how you write code, so the brainwashing accusation seems off to me.