Definition of a Limit
Practice Problem Answers
Practice 1: (a) so and " within unit of ".
(c) so and : "x within units of ".
Practice 2: "within 1 unit of 3": If , then which extends from 5 units to the left of 9 to 7 units to right of 9. Using the smaller of these two distances from 9, "If is within 5 units of 9, then is within unit of ".
"within units of ": If , then which extends from units to the left of 9 to units to the right of 9. "If is within units of 9, then is wqithin units of .
Practice 3: See Fig. 22.
Practice 4: See Fig. 23.
We have shown that "for any , there is a (namely " so that the rest of the definition is satisfied.
Practice 6: This is a much more sophisticated (= harder) problem.
Using "proof by contradiction" as outlined in the solution to Example 6.
(i) Assume that the limit exists: for some value for . Let . (The definition says "for every ε" so we can pick this value. For this limit, the definition fails for every ) Then, since we are assuming that the limit exists, there is a so that if is within of 0 then is within of L.
(ii) (See Fig. 24) Let be between and and also require that . Then so . Since is within of is within of , so L is greater than .
Let be between 0 and and also require that . Then so . Since is within of is
(iii) The two inequalities in bold print provide the contradiction we hoping to find, There is no value that satisfies
so we can conclude that our assumption was false and that does not have a limit as .