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Recall the Variance-Value Theorem which states that for any function continuous and differentiable over an interval :


It seemed strange that despite the deep ideas embodied in this result, one wasn't able to find any formulation of this theorem in any of the elementary calculus or introductory real analysis texts. I was curious to know why in these texts the mean-value theorem took precedence over the variance value theorem.

A practical answer is that the mean-value theorem is more useful, especially for the purposes of using calculus to approximate functions. With the mean-value theorem one can thus formulate a linear approximation to a function based on its derivative:



which serves as a prelude to Taylor's theorem and generalized power series expansions.

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