2: Limits
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”From a small seed a mighty trunk may grow.”
- Aeschylus
Chapter two invites us to begin our journey into calculus. We will discuss the most powerful tool we will use in this book: limits. Limits give a lot of information about how a function acts not just at one single point, but in the neighborhood around that point. We will see examples of many different kinds of limits, including right-handed and left-handed limits and double sided limits, and lay the foundation for our future work with limits as well. At first we will find the business of calculating limits to be a slow and painful process, but soon afterwards we will find some patterns to help us avoid this calculator intensive chore. These properties of limits will naturally lead us to define functions that are well behaved inside of the limits (polynomials). These polynomials are studied in depth, including factoring them using synthetic division, solving polynomial equations, and solving polynomial inequalities.