Subsections

# Uniqueness of the Taylor series

## Purpose

The purpose of this lab is to acquaint you with several useful techniques for generating Taylor series. These techniques include substitution and multiplication and division of series by simple polynomials.

## Background

The general form of the Taylor series representation with base point x=a of a function f(x) is given by the following

Definition 1

Suppose that f(x) is a smooth function in some open interval containing x=a and that for every fixed value of x in this interval, it can be shown that the Taylor polynomial remainder Rn(x) goes to zero as . Then the Taylor series representation with base point x=a of the function f(x) is given by

In class we will derive the following four important Taylor series.

where the last series is really the formula for the sum of a geometric series in disguise.

Once you have a Taylor series representation for a function, it can be used in several ways to generate Taylor series representations of related functions. This is because of the following theorem.

Theorem 1

Suppose f satisfies

for all x in some interval around a. Then,

Thus a function cannot have more than one power series in x-a that represents it.

The rest of the Background describes several different techniques for generating Taylor series of functions that are related to Taylor series that we already know. The four techniques are substitution, multiplication and division, integration, and differentiation. We have already seen examples of integration and differentiation with Taylor polynomials, but we haven't talked about the first two techniques yet.

### Substitution

To get a Taylor series for , you could go through the standard procedure of differentiating and substituting into the general formula, but an easier (and also correct) procedure is to take the series for and substitute 2x for x, obtaining

Writing out the first few terms gives

By the uniqueness theorem, this must be the Taylor series for .

The most commonly useful Taylor series have base point x=0 and that is what we will focus on in this lab. The technique of substitution is most useful if the substitution is of the form axn where a is a constant and n is a positive integer. For example, the series for is easy to obtain as

but it is not clear at all if the following substitution

produces a useful result. This is because you would have to do a lot of work expanding powers of x2+x and collecting terms to recover a power series in x.

Even if you use a substitution of the form axn, you have to be careful if the series is only valid for a finite interval about the base point. For example, suppose you wanted to find the Taylor series with base point t=0 for the function

You can obtain the desired series by substitution as

but you have to be careful because this formula is not valid for all values of t. In fact this formula is only valid if . The reason for this is that the series for 1/(1+x) is only valid if and when we substitute 2t for x, the formula only makes sense if .

### Multiplication and Division

If you have the Taylor series for f(x), and you want the Taylor series for something like x2 f(x), you just multiply each term of the series for f(x) by x2. If the leading term for the Taylor series of g(x) is xk for some integer k > 0, you can use division to obtain the Taylor series for g(x)/xn for any integer . Some examples follow.

### Term-by-term integration and differentiation

One of the nice properties of Taylor series is that they can be integrated and differentiated term-by-term. Here is the formal theorem, but the procedures are pretty straightforward.

Theorem 2

If a function f(x) has a Taylor series representation

then the derivative of f(x) has the Taylor series representation

obtained by differentiating each term in the series for f(x), and the series

obtained by integrating each term in the Taylor series for f(x), is an antiderivative of f(x).

## Exercises

1.
Verify that substitution and multiplication work as described above to generate Taylor series (with base point a=0) for the following functions. That is, compare the Taylor polynomials for various orders obtained directly with those obtained by substitution, multiplication, or division.
(a)
.
(b)
.
(c)
.
(d)
f(x) = x/(1+x).
(e)
.
2.
Find the first five terms of the Taylor series representation with base point x=0 for the function

in two ways. First, by computing the Taylor polynomial directly and, second, by using the series for 1/(1+x). What is the interval of convergence of the series representation? You might want to plot some Taylor polynomials to check your answer for the interval of convergence.

3.
Use substitution followed by integration to generate the first four terms in the Taylor series with base point x=0 for . (Hint - start with the series for 1/(1+x).)

4.
Can you find the sum of the series

if ?

5.
In the background section we only considered multiplication of series by polynomials. Suppose you wanted to generate the Taylor polynomial of order ten with base point x=0 for the function . Can you do this by multiplying Taylor polynomials for and ?