to 1".

Exponential growth is really about change, and changes need a

starting point (the unit amount) which they can then vary.
• Why do we multiply exponents? Shouldn’t 2 seconds and 3 seconds at the
same power be x 2 + x 3 ? It’s important to separate the amount of time we
put something in for (2 seconds) and the amount of growth it gets (x 2 ),
which is multiplied into the original amount.
When we have have 2 seconds of growth followed by 3 seconds of growth,
clearly we were growing for 5 seconds. But what was the total impact?
Our segments of growth scale/expand the previous amount, so we have
an expansion of x 2 followed by an expansion of x 3 . These expansions are
applied using multiplications – we are scaling (not linearly shifting, as in
addition) to get the new amount.
• What is 00 really? Technically, it’s an indeterminate form (like infin-
ity/infinity), which means it has no set value (and its value can differ
depending on how you arrived there). For practical purposes, it’s usually
defined to be 1 to simplify many equations.

Chapter 11: Euler’s Formula

• Euler’s formula is a wonderful example of combining several analogies.
And surprisingly, we can work backwards from e to get an intuition for
sine and cosine. The central idea is that a circle can be traversed in
two methods: we can consider a path along the outside (in radians!) or
consider a circle as overlaying a grid, with positions given by sine and
cosine.
• We can avoid a lot of memorization in trigonometry with Euler’s formula.
For example, what is sin(a+b)? A math robot would start chanting the
angle formulas. Not us! That question is asking "If I’m at angle a, and
increase it by angle b, how high am I on the circle?". It’s a pretty inter-
esting question – can we figure out our new height on the circle based on
our original angles?
We can. Because adding angles means multiplying complex numbers, we
can represents the angle "a+b" as the multiplication of two complex num-
bers. And if we can deconstruct those numbers into real and imaginary
parts (height and width on the circle) we can see how all those pieces
interact. Asking for the sine of (a+b) is really saying "What’s the imag-
inary part, the height, after you combine the angles?". It takes practice,
but once you can start turning equations into English, you can keep your
head straight as you solve the problem.
First, we want a complex number which adds two angles, like this:
e i (a+b)
Easy enough. We can actuall write that as a multiplication, like this:
= e i ·a · e i ·b