Section 10.17 : Applications of Series
1. Determine a Taylor Series about for the following integral.
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Start SolutionThis problem isn’t quite as hard as it might first appear. We know how to integrate a series so all we really need to do here is find a Taylor series for the integrand and then integrate that.
Show Step 2Okay, let’s start out by noting that we are working about and that means we can use the formula for the Taylor Series of the exponential function. For reference purposes this is,
Next, let’s strip out the term from this and then subtract one. Doing this gives,
Of course, in doing the above step all we really managed to do was eliminate the term from the series. In fact, that was not a bad thing to have happened as well see shortly.
Finally, let’s divide the whole thing by . This gives,
We moved the that was outside the series into the series. This is required in order to do the integral of the series. We only want a single in the problem and we now have that.
Also note that while the function on the left has a division by zero issue the series on the right does not have this problem. All of the ’s in the series have positive or zero exponents! This is a really good thing.
Of course, the other good thing that we have at this point is that we’ve managed to find a series representation for the integrand!
Show Step 3All we need to do now is compute the integral of the series to get a series representation of the integral.