e

New Scientist recently had an article about e [subscription of some sort required for full article], everybody's second favourite mathematical constant. (pi is everyone's favourite mathematical constant, obviously). It talked, in a relatively non-technical manner, about the reasons why e was exciting. It didn't talk about its role in statistics, in, for example, the normal distribution, but it's probably too difficult to do that without assuming some prior knowledge. [Did someone say too boring? Out of the room! NOW!]