[Mr_Minderbinder]

I find it surprising that logarithms and e (a.k.a. Napier’s constant), were developed and discovered only relatively recently in the history of mathematics despite how natural and fundamental they are.

The idea of exponential growth and the practice of charging interest in finance are both ancient. Surely an ancient mathematician would have investigated these in depth and discovered what Napier, Bernoulli and others found?

A while ago I was solving several infinite series of exponentials in the context of a problem concerning the half-life of medicines and I made frequent use of logarithms. That is when I started to wonder about their history.

[rramadass]

Arithmetic series/Geometric series/Mathematical Tables (construction and lookup) were all well known in the ancient world. Wikipedia mentions Babylonians and Indians for logarithms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logarithms#Predeces...) but doubtless others too had variations of the same. Travel/Trade/Finance/Astronomy/Astrology would have been the main drivers before the modern scientific era.

Here is an interesting book; The History of Mathematical Tables: from Sumer to Spreadsheets - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Mathematical_Ta...

We have lost a lot of knowledge accumulated and written down on biodegradable material (eg. papyri/palm leaves etc.) before the advent of the printing press made knowledge dissemination cheaper and easier. We then compounded the problem by dismissing everything before the beginning of our "scientific era" as being primitive/superstitious/non-methodical/etc. Only later on did we realize that many ancient civilizations were quite advanced in many aspects of mathematics and science though their way of approaching/inventing/recording was quite different from our "modern scientific method" and therefore we need to research them from a different pov and without condescension.

PS: History of Mathematics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics