Republic of the Philippines

CAMARINES NORTE STATE COLLEGE

College of Engineering
Lecture 02- Limits

Lecture Objectives:
At the end of this topic the students should be able to:
• Define limits and explain its properties,

• Evaluate limit of a function using properties and operations of limits,

Infinite Limits
We will take a look at limits whose value is infinity or minus infinity.
Definition

We say,
if we can make f (x) arbitrarily large for all x sufficiently close to x = a , from both sides, without
actually letting x = a .

We say,
if we can make f (x) arbitrarily large and negative for all x sufficiently close to x = a , from both sides,
without actually letting x = a .

Example : Evaluate each of the following limits.

Solution:

So, we’re going to be taking a look at a couple of one-sided limits as well as the normal limit here. In
all three cases notice that we can’t just plug in x = 0 . If we did we would get division by zero. Also
recall that the definitions above can be easily modified to give similar definitions for the two onesided
limits which we’ll be needing here.

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Calculus 1 – Differential Calculus
 Republic of the Philippines
CAMARINES NORTE STATE COLLEGE
F. Pimentel Avenue, Brgy. 2, Daet, Camarines Norte – 4600, Philippines

College of Engineering

Now, there are several ways we could proceed here to get values for these limits. One way is to plug
in some points and see what value the function is approaching. In the preceding section we said that
we were no longer going to do this, but in this case it is a good way to illustrate just what’s going on
with this function.

So, here is a table of values of x’s from both the left and the right. Using these values we’ll be able to
estimate the value of the two one-sided limits and once we have that done we can use the fact that
the normal limit will exist only if the two one-sided limits exist and have the same value.

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From this table we can see that as we make x smaller and smaller the function gets larger and
𝑥

larger and will retain the same sign that x originally had. It should make sense that this trend will
continue for any smaller value of x that we chose to use. The function is a constant (one in this case)
divided by an increasingly small number. The resulting fraction should be an increasingly large number
and as noted above the fraction will retain the same sign as x.
We can make the function as large and positive as we want for all x’s sufficiently close to zero while
staying positive (i.e. on the right). Likewise, we can make the function as large and negative as we
want for all x’s sufficiently close to zero while staying negative (i.e. on the left). So, from our definition
above it looks like we should have the following values for the two one sided limits.

Another way to see the values of the two one sided limits here is to graph the function. Again, in the
previous section we mentioned that we won’t do this too often as most functions are not something
we can just quickly sketch out as well as the problems with accuracy in reading values off the graph.
In this case however, it’s not too hard to sketch a graph of the function and, in this case as we’ll see
accuracy is not really going to be an issue. So, here is a quick sketch of the graph.

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Calculus 1 – Differential Calculus
 Republic of the Philippines
CAMARINES NORTE STATE COLLEGE
F. Pimentel Avenue, Brgy. 2, Daet, Camarines Norte – 4600, Philippines

College of Engineering

So, we can see from this graph that the function does behave much as we predicted that it would from
our table values. The closer x gets to zero from the right the larger (in the positive sense) the function
gets, while the closer x gets to zero from the left the larger (in the negative sense) the function gets.
Finally, the normal limit, in this case, will not exist since the two one-sided limits have different
values.

So, in summary here are the values of the three limits for this example.

Limits at Infinity
In the previous section we saw limits that were infinity and it’s now time to take a look at limits at
infinity. By limits at infinity we mean one of the following two limits.

In other words, we are going to be looking at what happens to a function if we let x get very large in
either the positive or negative sense. Also, these limits may also have infinity as a value.

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Calculus 1 – Differential Calculus
 Republic of the Philippines
CAMARINES NORTE STATE COLLEGE
F. Pimentel Avenue, Brgy. 2, Daet, Camarines Norte – 4600, Philippines

College of Engineering
Example : Evaluate each of the following limits.

1.

Solution:
Our first thought here is probably to just “plug” infinity into the polynomial and “evaluate” each term
to determine the value of the limit. It is pretty simple to see what each term will do in the limit and so
this seems like an obvious step, especially since we’ve been doing that for other limits in previous
sections.

So, let’s see what we get if we do that. As x approaches infinity, then x to a power can only get larger
and the coefficient on each term (the first and third) will only make the term even larger. So, if we look
at what each term is doing in the limit we get the following,

Now, we’ve got a small, but easily fixed, problem to deal with. We are probably tempted to say that
the answer is zero (because we have an infinity minus an infinity) or maybe −∞ (because we’re
subtracting two infinities off of one infinity). However, in both cases we’d be wrong. This is one of
those indeterminate forms that we first started seeing in a previous section.

Infinities just don’t always behave as real numbers do when it comes to arithmetic. Without more work
there is simply no way to know what ∞ − ∞ will be and so we really need to be careful with this kind
of problem.
So, we need a way to get around this problem. What we’ll do here is factor the largest power of x out
of the whole polynomial as follows,

If you’re not sure you agree with the factoring above (there’s a chance you haven’t really been asked
to do this kind of factoring prior to this) then recall that to check all you need to do is multiply the x4
back through the parenthesis to verify it was done correctly. Also, an easy way to remember how to
do this kind of factoring is to note that the second term is just the original polynomial divided by x4 .
This will always work when factoring a power of x out of a polynomial.

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Calculus 1 – Differential Calculus
 Republic of the Philippines
CAMARINES NORTE STATE COLLEGE
F. Pimentel Avenue, Brgy. 2, Daet, Camarines Norte – 4600, Philippines

College of Engineering
Now for each of the terms we have,

The first limit is clearly infinity and for the second limit we’ll use the fact above on the last two terms.

2. Evaluate the limit

Solution:
Divide both the numerator and the denominator by the variable with the highest exponent.
2𝑥 3
3
2𝑥 𝑥3
lim 3 = lim 3
𝑥→∞ 7𝑥 − 4𝑥 𝑥→∞ 7𝑥 − 4𝑥
𝑥3
2
= lim 4
𝑥→∞ 7− 2
𝑥

2
= 4
7− 2
∞
2
=7 your answer

Seatwork: Evaluate the following limits.

1.

2.

3.

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Calculus 1 – Differential Calculus
 Republic of the Philippines
CAMARINES NORTE STATE COLLEGE
F. Pimentel Avenue, Brgy. 2, Daet, Camarines Norte – 4600, Philippines

College of Engineering

4.

5.

6.

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Calculus 1 – Differential Calculus