Bernoulli, Jacob
The Swiss Jacob Bernoulli (1655 - 1705), son to a spice merchant, was a mathematician.
He discovered the constant e by studying a question about compound interest. Its approximate value 2.7182818... was calculated half a century later by Leonhard Euler.
However, his most important contribution was in the field of probability, where he derived the first version of the law of large numbers that states that the average of the results obtained from a large number of independent random samples converges to the true value, if it exists.
See also
Last modified:10 January 2026 1.27 p.m.