Irrational Exuberance (book) Irrational Exuberance (book) Irrational Exuberance is a March 2000 book written by American economist Robert J. Shiller, a Yale University professor and 2013 Nobel Prize winner. The book examines economic bubbles in the 1990s and early 2000s, and is named after Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's famed "irrational exuberance" quote warning of such a possible bubble in 1996. Published at the height of the dot-com boom, the text put forth several arguments demonstrating how the stock markets were overvalued at the time. The stock market collapse of 2000 happened the exact month of the book's publication. The second edition of
Proof that e is irrational between 2 and 3: We then analyze a blown-up difference "x" of the series representing "e" and its strictly smaller partial sum, which approximates the limiting value "e". By choosing the magnifying factor to be the factorial of "b", the fraction ⁄ and the partial sum are turned into integers, hence "x" must be a positive integer. However, the fast convergence of the series representation implies that the magnified approximation error "x" is still strictly smaller than 1. From this contradiction we deduce that "e" is irrational. Suppose that "e" is a rational number. Then there exist positive integers "a"