How were numbers like e and pie found? I use them so much in school and have yet to discover how they were discovered.

How were numbers like e and pi found?

pi has been known about for thousands of years, at least since the time of the Ancient Egyptians around 2600BC People mostly just figured that such a ratio must exist and used whatever approximation they could - probably originally measured by laying a piece of string around a circle and then measuring that.

 

Archimedes came up with reasonable approximations for pi by inscribing polygons of a large degree around 250BC, known now as the method of exhaustion, considering that there weren't many computational resources available - regular polygons didn't make terrible approximations of circles:

It wasn't until the development of calculus that anyone knew for sure that pi was in fact a transcendental number and it could really be studied in detail.

 

Logarithms cropped up in the 1500s but the first mentions of e weren't until the 1600s, apparently as part of a solution to a problem of compound interest.

Wow, that was a great answer, thanks for helping expand my view on those numbers!