Thursday 15 August 2019

calculus - Why is $infty cdot 0$ an indeterminate form, if $infty$ can be treated as a very large positive number?




Why is $\infty \cdot 0$ indeterminate?



Although $\infty$ is not a real number, it can be treated as a very large positive number, and any number multiplied by $0$ is $0$. Why not in this case?


Answer




Why is $\infty \cdot 0$ indeterminate?




It's called indeterminate because if you get $\infty \cdot 0$ when evaluating a limit, then you can't conclude anything about the result.

Here's an example:
$$
\lim_{n \to \infty} (n^2) \cdot \left(\frac{1}{n}\right).
$$

Now, this limit is $\infty$. But the limit of the first thing $(n^2)$ is $\infty$, and the limit of the second $(1/n)$ is $0$. So we cannot evaluate $\infty \cdot 0$ to compute the limit.



More technically: If we have one sequence $a_1, a_2, a_3, \ldots$ of real numbers that approaches $\infty$, and another $b_1, b_2, b_3, \ldots$ that approaches $0$, the product sequence $a_1 b_1, a_2 b_2, a_3 b_3, \ldots$ might approach any real number, or it might not approach anything at all.
This is what it means for $\infty \cdot 0$ to be an "indeterminate form".





Although $\infty$ is not a real number, it can be treated as a very large positive number




No, I would not agree with this statement.
It may be helpful to intuitively think of $\infty$ as a very large positive number, but this is not what infinity is. $\infty$ is a sort of limit of higher and higher positive numbers.
In the same way $0$ is a limit of lower and lower positive numbers.




and any number multiplied by $0$ is $0$. Why not in this case?





As explained above, $\infty$ is not a very large number, but rather a limit of larger and larger numbers. So we cannot say that multiplying $\infty$ by $0$ is $0$.


No comments:

Post a Comment

real analysis - How to find $lim_{hrightarrow 0}frac{sin(ha)}{h}$

How to find $\lim_{h\rightarrow 0}\frac{\sin(ha)}{h}$ without lhopital rule? I know when I use lhopital I easy get $$ \lim_{h\rightarrow 0}...