Comment by necovek
9 hours ago
> Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.
A very common example is compound, continual interest accumulation. As a mathematician, I had trouble understanding how banks calculate it (as they would obviously not point me at the derivation of the formula), but it's actually a limit sum over infinitely small interest terms.
Similarly, these techniques work to explain and derive numerical methods for calculating many natural constants like e, pi etc.
The only intuitive definition of e I can remember is "how much $1 becomes after a year in a savings account with 100% interest compounded infinitely" funny enough.
That definition also gives a nice introduction to e's taylor series!
Where I live, the banks say that they compound interest daily, but pay interest monthly. So, I think the small interest term is just limited to a day where the error is small enough for the average person to not care.