The Exponential Function
This lecture appears in YouTube titled The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See, with this introduction:
4 million views for an old codger giving a lecture about arithmetic?? What's going on? You'll just have to watch to see what's so damn amazing about what he (Albert Bartlett) has to say.
I introduce this video to my students as "Perhaps the most boring video you'll ever see, and definitely the most important." But then again, after watching it most said that if you followed along with what the presenter (a professor emeritus of Physics at Univ of Colorado-Boulder) is saying, it's quite easy to pay attention, because it is so damn compelling.
Entire playlist for the lecture: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6A1FD147A45EF50D
"The greatest shortcoming
of the human race
is our inability
to understand
the exponential function."
- Prof. Al Bartlett
See Exponential Function in Wikipedia for more maths
"Can you think of
any problem
in any area of human endeavor
on any scale,
from microscopic to global,
whose long-term solution
is in any demonstrable way
aided, assisted, or advanced
by further increases
in population,
locally, nationally,
or globally?"
- Prof. Al Bartlett
Albert A. Bartlett is Professor Emeritus in Nuclear Physics at University of Colorado at Boulder. He has been a member of the faculty of the University of Colorado since 1950. He was President of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1978 and in 1981 he received theirRobert A. Millikan Award for his outstanding scholarly contributions to physics education.
Dr. Bartlett has given his celebrated lecture, Arithmetic, Population and Energy over 1,600 times. His collected writings have been published in the book, "The Essential Exponential! For the Future of Our Planet".