Truncation Error in Taylor Series

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Taylor series for transcendental functions have an infinite number of terms. This Demonstration shows the truncation error created by using a finite number of terms in approximating three such functions with Taylor series based at zero.
Contributed by: Vincent Shatlock and Autar Kaw (April 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
The general form of a Taylor series is
,
assuming the function and all its derivatives exist and are continuous on an interval
centered at
and containing
.
Here are the Maclaurin series (a special case of a Taylor series written around the point ) for the three functions considered:
In this Demonstration, we show the truncation error as a function of the number of terms of the Maclaurin series for the particular value of the function argument.
Questions:
1. For what values of would the given Maclaurin series for
diverge?
2. How would you choose the number of terms to get the value of
correct up to a specified number of significant digits?
3. The other source of error in numerical methods is round-off error. What influence does this have on the accuracy of the approximations?
Reference
[1] A. K. Kaw, D. Nguyen, and E. E. Kalu, Numerical Methods with Applications, 2010. http://numericalmethods.eng.usf.edu/publications_book.html.
Permanent Citation