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A function cannot be written as a Taylor series centred at a singularity; in these cases, one can often still achieve a series expansion if one allows also negative powers of the variable x; see Laurent series. For example, f (x) = e −1/x 2 can be written as a Laurent series.
Taylor's theorem is named after the mathematician Brook Taylor, who stated a version of it in 1715, [2] although an earlier version of the result was already mentioned in 1671 by James Gregory. [ 3 ] Taylor's theorem is taught in introductory-level calculus courses and is one of the central elementary tools in mathematical analysis .
In probability theory, it is possible to approximate the moments of a function f of a random variable X using Taylor expansions, provided that f is sufficiently differentiable and that the moments of X are finite.
[2] A nice way to double-check that these relations are correct is to do a Taylor expansion of the translation operator acting on a position-space wavefunction. Expanding the exponential to all orders, the translation operator generates exactly the full Taylor expansion of a test function: = ^ () = (^) = (=!
In fact, for a smooth enough function, we have the similar Taylor expansion (+) = | | ()! + (,), where the last term (the remainder) depends on the exact version of Taylor's formula.
A formal power series can be loosely thought of as an object that is like a polynomial, but with infinitely many terms.Alternatively, for those familiar with power series (or Taylor series), one may think of a formal power series as a power series in which we ignore questions of convergence by not assuming that the variable X denotes any numerical value (not even an unknown value).
If an operator is not simply expressed as a product, but as a function of another operator, we must first perform a Taylor expansion of this function. This is the case of the Wilson loop, which is defined as a path-ordered exponential to guarantee that the Wilson loop encodes the holonomy of the gauge connection.
Two ways of making this expansion can be found in the literature: The first is a Taylor series in the Cartesian coordinates x, y, and z, while the second is in terms of spherical harmonics which depend on spherical polar coordinates. The Cartesian approach has the advantage that no prior knowledge of Legendre functions, spherical harmonics, etc ...