The American Mathematical Monthly

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A Simplification of Taylor's Theorem

Fred Brauer

To cite this article: Fred Brauer (1987) A Simplification of Taylor's Theorem, The American
Mathematical Monthly, 94:5, 453-455, DOI: 10.1080/00029890.1987.12000665

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00029890.1987.12000665

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1987] THE TEACHING OF MATHEMATICS 453

A Simplification of Taylor's Theorem

fRED BRAUER
Department of Mathematics, Universi~y of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706

Taylor's formula with remainder is an essential part of the presentation of

representation of functions by power series in a calculus course. While there are
several proofs available, none is very satisfying to students. Perhaps for this reason,
the treatment of Taylor's formula in calculus texts varies greatly. An informal
survey of nine recent texts designed for "students of business or the social or
biological sciences" revealed that one-third give a statement of Taylor's theorem
without proof while the remainder managed to pass from Taylor polynomials to
Taylor series without mention of remainders. A parallel survey of 18 recent texts
designed for "the standard three semester sequence" showed that all gave a
statement and proof of Taylor's theorem; three essentially different proofs were
used.
Approximately three-fourths of the texts surveyed used either a proof based on
Rolle's theorem (e.g., [1]) or a proof involving an application of the Cauchy form of
the mean value theorem (e.g., [2]). All of these proofs make use of auxiliary
functions whose choice cannot be motivated; their appearance can only reinforce
students' belief that mathematical proofs are arbitrary and illogical creations. Four
of the books examined used a proof based on repeated integration by parts (e.g.,
[3]). This proof is better motivated, but it still tends to lose students in technical
details because integration by parts is usually not well understood by elementary
students and because the factors must be chosen cleverly to make the integrated
terms vanish. It is probably not at all helpful to point out that repeated integration
by parts can be replaced by repeated interchange of order of integration in an
iterated integral.
In most applications, the explicit form of the remainder in Taylor's formula is
irrelevant; what matters is that a function can be approximated by a Taylor
polynomial with an error term which can be estimated. The purpose of this note is
to give an error estimate directly without going by way of an explicit representation
for the remainder. The proof depends only on the representation of a function as
the integral of its derivative and the fact that a definite integral is bounded by the
product of the maximum of the absolute value of the integrand and the length of the
interval of integration.
THEOREM. Suppose that for some integer n ~ 0 the functions f, f', ... , J<n> are
continuous on [a, b] and that J<n+l) exists and satisfies IJ<n+l>(t)l ~ M on (a, b).
Then on [a, b],
!"(a) 2
f(x) = J(a) + f'(a)(x- a)+ - - ( x - a) +
2!
(1)
454 FRED BRAUER [May

with

(2)

Proof We give the proof for the case a < b; the modification to treat the case
a > b is easy. The Taylor polynomial

/"(a) 2 J<nJ(a)
Pn(x) =/(a)+ f'(a)(x- a)+ - !-(x- a) + · · · + n! (x- ar
2
is chosen to have the properties
/'(a)= P:(a), ... , j<nl(a) = p~nl(a). (3)
Because Pn is a polynomial of degree n,
p~n+lJ(x) = 0, a~ x ~b. (4)
The remainder Rn(x) is defined by (1), so that
Rn(x) = f(x)- Pn(x).
Because of (3),
(5)
and because of (4),
a< t < x. (6)
Integration of (6) with the aid of (5) gives
R~nl(x) = R~nl(a) + fxR~n+ll(t) dt = fx/n(n+l)(t) dt,
a a

and the bound IJ<n+l)(t)l ~ M gives

IR~nl(x)l ~ [iJ<n+lJ(t)ldt ~ M(x- a).

a

A second integration gives

R~n-l)(x) = R~n-lJ(a) + fxR~"l(t) dt = fxR~nl(t) dt,
a a

IR~n-ll(x)l~ f xIR~nl(t)ldt~ fx M(t-a)dt= -(x-a).

a
M
2 a
2

We may continue in this way, or prove by induction that for j = 0, 1, ... , n

IR(n-Jl(x) I~ M (x- a)J+l a~ x ~b. (7)

n "' (j + 1)! '

The desired estimate (2) is the case j = n of (7), and this completes the proof.
1987] THE TEACHING OF MATHEMATICS 455

We suggest that this approach gives a way of treating Taylor series clearly and
comprehensibly for students of elementary calculus.

REFERENCES
1. R. Ellis and D. Gulick, Calculus with Analytic Geometry, 3rd ed., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986,
pp. 557-558.
2. L. Leithold, The Calculus with Analytic Geometry, 5th ed., Harper & Row, 1986. pp. 738-740.
3. J. Marsden and A. Weinstein, Calculus, Benjamin-Cummings, 1980, pp. 574-576.