Someone copied me in a long distribution list with a picture of this check attached. I don’t know anyone in the distribution list, so I would say it is spam, but I happened to look at the picture and I thought this was pretty funny. I don’t know the whole story, but my assumption is that Verizon sent this guy a bill, or turned him into a collections agency for $0.002. The exponential evaluates to -1 and the infinite series evaluates to 1 making the value of the equation $0.002.
The subject of the e-mail was never tick off an engineer, but I don’t think this guy was an engineer, I think that he was a mathematician. The reason I think that is because I am pretty sure that electrical engineering is the only branch of engineering to use complex eponentials in practice, and electrical engineers don’t use the letter i to represent the square root of -1, we use j because i is typically used for current. So, if an electrical engineer were to write this, it probably would have been e to the j times pi instead. So, I think that this guy was probably a math student or something.
I got a laugh out of it.