Learn Intuitively ??

At last, all of my classes started and going on well as of now. First week classes were pretty introductory and hence no big assignments were given yet. But there were some learnings for sure. In one of the classes of Network Security, we discussed about the Birthday Paradox problem. The prof just touched on it and gave the rest as homework. Later I googled about this paradox and learnt (real learning) two more things which I have been using since my school days.  I hope all of us would have used the constant e and the natural algorithm ln lot of times in our math subjects.  And, most of us would answer ln(e) = 1 when and whereever if someone asks us. I don't know how many of us would really know the meaning behind these terms and their actual usage. At least, I have never thought intuitively about these stuff so far. Thats why I used the term 'used' rather than learnt. 

This problem, birthday paradox, involves some derivations using ln and e. Fortunately google directed me to a site called www.betterexplained.com where the author has explained about this problem, the constant e and ln in very simple terms.  This is the first time that I enjoyed learning some math stuff and understood something intuitively. The website name certainly stands for its content. The author is not math professsional. He is just a computer science undergrad and working somewhere now.  Many thanks to him for his brilliant work and few to Google for giving me the link to this site. :)

If you wanna know more about e and ln, go through the below links. I am sure it would be useful by some means.

http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-birthday-paradox/

http://betterexplained.com/articles/demystifying-the-natural-logarithm-ln/

There are lot more math and other general stuff posted on this website. Have to go through them in my leisure time.

p.s.  Still I have a hunch that tells me at least 2 or 3 guys from my class would know ln and e very well in our undergraduation itself if not in schoolings.  One of my probable for this list is Shankar. Hope my hunch would be true.