Office_Shredder
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Gold Member
- 5,705
- 1,589
The reason you exclude the value that you're taking the limit towards is because you often have a function f(x) which is not defined at x=a, but is continuous elsewhere, and you want to know if you can extend the function continuously to a value at x=a. You can write this in shorthand notation as whether the limit
\lim_{x\to a} f(x)
exists, but only if the definition of the limit does not permit plugging x=a into the formula for f(x). If it does then the limit trivially doesn't exist because the function's original domain didn't include that point. It would be easy enough to work around but new notation/definitions of other things would have to be constructed to maintain rigor
\lim_{x\to a} f(x)
exists, but only if the definition of the limit does not permit plugging x=a into the formula for f(x). If it does then the limit trivially doesn't exist because the function's original domain didn't include that point. It would be easy enough to work around but new notation/definitions of other things would have to be constructed to maintain rigor