Calculus 2 : Taylor and Maclaurin Series

Study concepts, example questions & explanations for Calculus 2

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Example Questions

Example Question #51 : Taylor And Maclaurin Series

Give the Maclaurin series for the function

up to the third term.

Possible Answers:

Correct answer:

Explanation:

The Maclaurin series for  is 

Substitute  for . The series becomes

Example Question #3081 : Calculus Ii

Give the Maclaurin series for the function

up to the third term.

Possible Answers:

Correct answer:

Explanation:

Rewrite this function as .

The Maclaurin series for , taken to the third term, is .

Substitute  for :

Example Question #51 : Taylor And Maclaurin Series

Give the polar form of the equation of a circle with center at  and radius .

Possible Answers:

Correct answer:

Explanation:

This circle will have equation

.

Rewrite this as follows:

Example Question #1 : Maclaurin Series

Suppose that . Calculate 

Possible Answers:

Correct answer:

Explanation:

Let's find the power series of  centered at  to find . We have

This series is much easier to differentiate than the expression . We must look at term , which is the only constant term left after differentiating 48 times. This is the only important term, because when we plug in , all of the non-constant terms are zero. So we must have

Example Question #1 : Maclaurin Series

What is the value of the following infinite series?

Possible Answers:

Correct answer:

Explanation:

We can recognize this series as  since the power series is

with the value  plugged into  since

.

So then we have

.

Example Question #1 : Maclaurin Series

What is the value of the following infinite series?

Possible Answers:

The infinite series diverges.

Correct answer:

Explanation:

The infinite series can be computed easily by splitting up the two components of the numerator:

Now we recall the MacLaurin series for the exponential function , which is 

which converges for all . We can see that the two infinite series are  with , respectively. So we have

Example Question #4 : Maclaurin Series

Find the value of the infinite series.

Possible Answers:

The series does not converge.

Correct answer:

Explanation:

We can evaluate the series

by recognizing it as a power series of a known function with a value plugged in for . In particular, it looks similar to :

After manipulating the series, we get

.

Now it suffices to evalute , which is .

So the infinite series has value

.

Example Question #5 : Maclaurin Series

Find the value of the following infinite series:

Possible Answers:

Correct answer:

Explanation:

After doing the following manipulation:

We can see that this is the power series 

 with  plugged in.

So we have

Example Question #6 : Maclaurin Series

Find the value of the following series.

Possible Answers:

Divergent.

Correct answer:

Explanation:

We can split up the sum to get 

.

We know that the power series for  is 

and that each sum, 

 

and

 

are simply  with  plugged in, respectively.

Thus, 

.

Example Question #7 : Maclaurin Series

Find the value of the infinite series.

Possible Answers:

Infinite series does not converge.

Correct answer:

Explanation:

The series 

 looks similar to the series for , which is 

but the series we want to simplify starts at , so we can fix this by adding a  and subtracting a , to leave the value unchanged, i.e., 

.

So now we have  with , which gives us .

So then we have:

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