'Centuries before becoming shopworn shorthand for countless electronic fads, e meant something. It meant about 2.7, to be inexact.

The little letter actually stands for an infinitely long number, the outcome of an endless equation. It looms large in physics, engineering, statistics and finance.

It even inspired the target for search-engine giant Google's first stock sale: $2,718,281,828.

And so it figures that Florida Atlantic University mechanical engineering professor Isaac Elishakoff and his "Analytical Methods" students sang the number's praises Tuesday -- the seventh day of February, or 2.7. Or, to them, "e day."

The tongue-in-cheek results ranged from sonnet to Seuss ("a true mystery! / Greater than two, but not equal to three!"). There was mathematical rap ("e / that number-one playa") and classic-rock rewrite. Apparently, one is actually not the loneliest number.

E does, arguably, lead something of a wistful existence, overshadowed as it is by its celebrity cousin pi. But e is no less a factor in modern life. It pops up in calculations of compound interest and population growth, among other things, and claims its own fan base among math connoisseurs.

"E is the beef of engineering," says Elishakoff, an authority on the effects of vibration. "All other numbers, we can say, are dessert."

Except, perhaps, on Tuesday, when his students took in e-shaped cookies with their customary diet of varsity-level calculus.

"We learned all this hard math, and now we're just playing around with it," said junior Glen Cabezas.'