But WHY Is e The Natural Number?

e is the special number that helps us understand how things grow or shrink smoothly over time, like watching a plant grow slowly day by day.

Imagine you have a piggy bank with $1 in it, and every year, it gets 100% more money, just like getting a birthday gift. If the bank gives you the extra money once a year, after one year you'll have $2.

But what if the bank was extra generous and gave you 50% every six months? Then after one year, you'd have a bit more than $2, because your money is growing twice as fast, like getting two gifts!

Now imagine if the bank gave you 1/365th of 100% every day. By the end of the year, you’d have even more money than before.

If we keep making the time between gifts smaller and smaller, like a million tiny gifts in a year, eventually, the amount of money you'd have is getting closer to something special: e, which is about 2.718.

That’s how e shows up in nature, banking, even how bacteria multiply, it's just a number that happens when things grow smoothly over time!