Question

taylor series, Big O, rare event approximations et al. Can anyone point me to "beginner's" guide to understanding how/why you throw away terms from a Taylor Series to give an approximation. Something like "Approximations for Dummies" ;)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

When you have a polynomial, take the highest degree and throw away the coefficients and other terms.

Answer 2

exponential functions beat out power functions, which beat our logs, which beat out constants and sin or cos

Answer 3

only initial terms matter as their value is high enough...yu can see that when yu evaluate the limit for a polynomial function when x tends to infinity ,then yu only analyze the behaviour of highest degree polynomial and leaving others and its effect is more pronounced as compared to others

Answer 4

All sounds good, has anyone a link to a page/pdf etc of an aggregation of the rules/heuristics please??

Answer 5

Well for instance you can represent a sine function as an infinite polynomial. No one I know can write down an infinite number of terms, so you have to stop somewhere. Where you stop is your approximation, I don't know if that's what you're asking but it's not really that complicated.

Answer 6

I was asking, a couple of times, for links to a set of rules on a page.

Answer 7

Well that's all I've got to offer I'm afraid. Anything else would be me googling your question and pasting what I find. I can try to answer questions with my brain and hope that you just get a general intuition for it like you would for, say, logarithms perhaps? Whatevers.

Answer 8

Ah, google. A bevy of a million websites with matching terms that still aren't a single page of rules - which is why I was asking for help pointing me to a single page of rules.

Answer 9

I guess I don't understand what you're coming from, are you taking an engineering course or calculus 2 or what?