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The Taylor Expansion
Sometimes we may be faced with a very complicated function f(x) whosebehavior in general may not interest us but we may be interested in its properties at ornear a point x=a. To extract this behavior it is possible to write
f(x) = A
0
+ A
1
(x-a) + A
2
(x-a)
2
+ A
3
(x-a)
3
+ ... =
∑
n=0
∞
A
n
(x-a)
n
If we are interested in the function near a then the quantities (x-a)
n
will becomerapidly smaller and smaller and ultimately vanishing after some value of n. Thusthe function has now been approximated by a polynomial. The catch howeverlies in obtaining the coefficients of the expansion. A trick catch however lies inobtaining the coefficients of the expansion. A trick was provided by Taylor andproceeds as follows:(a) In eq (1.1) everywhere put x=a, then all terms vanish except A
0
∴
A
0
= f(a)(1.2)(b) differentiate eq. (1.1) once with respect to xdf(x)dx= A
1
+ 2A
2
(x-a) + 3A
3
(x-a)
2
+ ...(1.3)Now set, in eq. (1.3), x=a everywheredf(x)dx|
x=a
= A
1
= 1!A
1
(1.4)(c) Differentiate eq. (1.1) twice or what amounts to differentiating eq. (1.3) onced
2
f(x)dx
2
= 2A
2
+ 6A
3
(x-a) + ...(1.5)Now set x=a andd
2
f(x)dx
2
|
x=a
= 2A
2
= 2!A
2
(1.6)If you continue in this way you will soon discover thatd
n
f(x)dx
n
|
x=a
= n!A
n
(1.7)
∴
A
n
=1n! d
n
f(x)dx
n
|
x=a
}
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