# The Lagrange Highway

Recently, there was an interesting discussion on the AP Calculus Community discussion boards about the Lagrange error bound. You may link to it by clicking here. The replies by James L. Hartman and Daniel J. Teague were particularly enlightening and included files that you may download with the proof of Taylor’s Theorem (Hartman) and its geometric interpretation (Teague).

There are also two good Kahn Academy videos on Taylor’s theorem and the error bound on YouTube. The first part is here (11:26 minutes) and the second part is here (15:08 minutes).

I wrotean earlier blog post on the topic of error bounds on February 22, 2013, that you can find here.

Taylor’s Theorem says that

If f is a function with derivatives through order n + 1 on an interval I containing a, then, for each x in I , there exists a number c between x and a such that

$\displaystyle f\left( x \right)=\sum\limits_{k=1}^{n}{\frac{{{f}^{\left( k \right)}}\left( a \right)}{k!}{{\left( x-a \right)}^{k}}}+\frac{{{f}^{\left( n+1 \right)}}\left( c \right)}{\left( n+1 \right)!}{{\left( x-a \right)}^{n+1}}$

The number $\displaystyle R=\frac{{{f}^{\left( n+1 \right)}}\left( c \right)}{\left( n+1 \right)!}{{\left( x-a \right)}^{n+1}}$ is called the remainder.

The equation above says that if you can find the correct c the function is exactly equal to Tn(x) + R.

Tn(x) is called the n th  Taylor Approximating Polynomial. (TAP). Notice the form of the remainder is the same as the other terms, except it is evaluated at the mysterious c that we don’t know and usually are not able to find without knowing the value we are trying to approximate.

Lagrange Error Bound. (LEB)

$\displaystyle \left| \frac{{{f}^{\left( n+1 \right)}}\left( c \right)}{\left( n+1 \right)!}{{\left( x-a \right)}^{n-1}} \right|\le \left( \text{max}\left| {{f}^{\left( n+1 \right)}}\left( x \right) \right| \right)\frac{{{\left| x-a \right|}^{n+1}}}{\left( n+1 \right)!}$

The number $\displaystyle \left( \text{max}\left| {{f}^{\left( n+1 \right)}}\left( x \right) \right| \right)\frac{{{\left| x-c \right|}^{n+1}}}{\left( n+1 \right)!}\ge \left| R \right|$ is called the Lagrange Error Bound. The expression $\left( \text{max}\left| {{f}^{\left( n+1 \right)}}\left( x \right) \right| \right)$ means the maximum absolute value of the (n + 1) derivative on the interval between the value of x and c.

The LEB is then a positive number greater than the error in using the TAP to approximate the function f(x). In symbols $\left| {{T}_{n}}\left( x \right)-f\left( x \right) \right|.

Here is a little story that I hope will help your students understand what all this means.