L'Hôpital's rule can be stated as follows:
Let f,g be differentiable real functions defined on a deleted one-sided neighbourhood(1) of a, where a can be any real number or ±∞. Suppose that both f,g converge to 0 or that both f,g converge to +∞ as x→a± (± depending on the side of the deleted neighbourhood). If
f′(x)g′(x)→L,
then
f(x)g(x)→L,
where L can be any real number or ±∞.
This is an ubiquitous tool for computations of limits, and some books avoid proving it or just prove it in some special cases. Since we don't seem to have a consistent reference for its statement and proof in MathSE and it is a theorem which is often misapplied (see here for an example), it seems valuable to have a question which could serve as such a reference. This is an attempt at that.
(1)E.g., if a=1, then (1,3) is such a neighbourhood.
No comments:
Post a Comment