Hi,

I've tried to understand this thing for the last couple of days now and well, I have made some progress. It's way too early really since I haven't even done complex numbers yet in my studies but, well, it feels like to understand this formula you have to understand a lot of ideas and put them together and so I feel it isn't a waste of time.

I think that most of the difficulty that comes from this is basically getting too hooked up on the e^x there, instead of thinking about it as a function or formula, and then scaling it by ix. And since 'i' is periodic it really needs to be represented in a Taylor series or perhaps in the formula for compounding interest or it doesn't really work. And since, well e^x in all cases really means scaling 'e' somehow, a power of 'i' should mean the same thing, but , again it needs to be represented by expanding e^x as a formula...

I don't know where I'm going with this, but basically this formula is difficult to understand initially because it.. well, you have to roll it out in order to make sense of it. In reality it is quite simple.

I always feel like math is teached as vaguely as it possible can be taught and that makes it difficult instead of just, hey, lets lay this thing on the table here, unpack everything, and discuss every little detail about it assuming you have never seen any of it before, and then put it all together and discuss every little minute step of it so that nothing what so ever is left to any kind of interpretation other than what is really is.

Thanks