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In his 1821 book Cours d'analyse, Augustin-Louis Cauchy discussed variable quantities, infinitesimals and limits, and defined continuity of = by saying that an infinitesimal change in x necessarily produces an infinitesimal change in y, while Grabiner claims that he used a rigorous epsilon-delta definition in proofs. [2]
The epsilon–delta definition of a limit was introduced to formalize the definition of continuity. Continuity is one of the core concepts of calculus and mathematical analysis, where arguments and values of functions are real and complex numbers. The concept has been generalized to functions between metric spaces and between topological spaces.
The basic idea behind Delta-epsilon proofs is, arguably, first found in the works of Cauchy in the 1820s. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Cauchy did not clearly distinguish between continuity and uniform continuity on an interval.
The modern definition of a limit goes back to Bernard Bolzano who, in 1817, developed the basics of the epsilon-delta technique to define continuous functions. However, his work remained unknown to other mathematicians until thirty years after his death. [5]
A limit of a sequence of points () in a topological space is a special case of a limit of a function: the domain is in the space {+}, with the induced topology of the affinely extended real number system, the range is , and the function argument tends to +, which in this space is a limit point of .
A sequence of functions () converges uniformly to when for arbitrary small there is an index such that the graph of is in the -tube around f whenever . The limit of a sequence of continuous functions does not have to be continuous: the sequence of functions () = (marked in green and blue) converges pointwise over the entire domain, but the limit function is discontinuous (marked in red).
In mathematical analysis, limit superior and limit inferior are important tools for studying sequences of real numbers.Since the supremum and infimum of an unbounded set of real numbers may not exist (the reals are not a complete lattice), it is convenient to consider sequences in the affinely extended real number system: we add the positive and negative infinities to the real line to give the ...
This is a list of limits for common functions such as elementary functions. In this article, the terms a, b and c are constants with respect to x.