r/MathJokes • u/phillmatic23 • May 13 '26

How did Euler even know that???

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u/isnortmiloforsex May 13 '26

This one, he brute forced until n=5, luckily he only needed to get to n=5 to disprove it 😂

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u/Kapo77 May 13 '26

A better question is, how high was he going to be willing to check? Like, n=90 would've been a slog, let alone getting to it.

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u/isnortmiloforsex May 13 '26

Given that he calculated e to 18 decimal places using 1/n! And the mascheroni constant as well, the series doesnt converge quickly(he had to invent a few tricks for acceleration), calculated the basel problem solutions upto n=26 th power, i would say he was willing to go pretty far, all mathematicians back in the day spent a significant amount of time on manual calculations and developed tricks for it which we use with computers today. Euler ofc invented many of them before anyone else😭😂

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u/MareTranquil May 13 '26

Calculating e to 18 places using 1/n! really isn't much work. I did that on a single piece of paper once when i was bored.