Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In mathematics, the term undefined refers to a value, function, or other expression that cannot be assigned a meaning within a specific formal system. [ 1 ] Attempting to assign or use an undefined value within a particular formal system, may produce contradictory or meaningless results within that system.
However it is not appropriate to call an expression "indeterminate form" if the expression is made outside the context of determining limits. An example is the expression 0 0 {\displaystyle 0^{0}} . Whether this expression is left undefined, or is defined to equal 1 {\displaystyle 1} , depends on the field of application and may vary between ...
However, more insidious are missing solutions, which can occur when performing operations on expressions that are invalid for certain values of those expressions. For example, if we were solving the following equation, the correct solution is obtained by subtracting 4 {\displaystyle 4} from both sides, then dividing both sides by 2 ...
Alfred Tarski explained the role of primitive notions as follows: [4]. When we set out to construct a given discipline, we distinguish, first of all, a certain small group of expressions of this discipline that seem to us to be immediately understandable; the expressions in this group we call PRIMITIVE TERMS or UNDEFINED TERMS, and we employ them without explaining their meanings.
For a given combination of values for the free variables, an expression may be evaluated, although for some combinations of values of the free variables, the value of the expression may be undefined. Thus an expression represents an operation over constants and free variables and whose output is the resulting value of the expression. [22]
Safely handling undefined values is important in optimistic concurrency control systems, which detect race conditions after the fact. For example, reading a shared variable protected by seqlock will produce an undefined value before determining that a race condition happened. It will then discard the undefined data and retry the operation.
The expressions 0 0, ∞ 0 and 1 ∞ are considered indeterminate forms when they occur as limits (just like ∞ × 0), and the question of whether zero to the zero power should be defined as 1 has divided opinion. If the output is considered as undefined when a parameter is undefined, then pow(1, qNaN) should produce a qNaN.
L'Hôpital's rule (/ ˌ l oʊ p iː ˈ t ɑː l /, loh-pee-TAHL) or L'Hospital's rule, also known as Bernoulli's rule, is a mathematical theorem that allows evaluating limits of indeterminate forms using derivatives.