Today’s is another of those words that means nearly what you would guess. There are still seven letters left, by the way, which haven’t had any requested terms. If you’d like something described please try asking.
Local.
Stops at every station, rather than just the main ones.
OK, I’ll take it seriously.
So a couple years ago I visited Niagara Falls, and I stepped into the river, just above the really big drop.
I didn’t have any plans to go over the falls, and didn’t, but I liked the thrill of claiming I had. I’m not crazy, though; I picked a spot I knew was safe to step in. It’s only in the retelling I went into the Niagara River just above the falls.
Because yes, there is surely danger in certain spots of the Niagara River. But there are also spots that are perfectly safe. And not isolated spots either. I wouldn’t have been less safe if I’d stepped into the river a few feet closer to the edge. Nor if I’d stepped in a few feet farther away. Where I stepped in was locally safe.
Over in mathematics we do a lot of work on stuff that’s true or false depending on what some parameters are. We can look at bunches of those parameters, and they often look something like normal everyday space. There’s some values that are close to what we started from. There’s others that are far from that.
So, a “neighborhood” of some point is that point and some set of points containing it. It needs to be an “open” set, which means it doesn’t contain its boundary. So, like, everything less than one minute’s walk away, but not the stuff that’s precisely one minute’s walk away. (If we include boundaries we break stuff that we don’t want broken is why.) And certainly not the stuff more than one minute’s walk away. A neighborhood could have any shape. It’s easy to think of it as a little disc around the point you want. That’s usually the easiest to describe in a proof, because it’s “everything a distance less than (something) away”. (That “something” is either ‘δ’ or ‘ε’. Both Greek letters are called in to mean “a tiny distance”. They have different connotations about what the tiny distance is in.) It’s easiest to draw as little amoeba-like blob around a point, and contained inside a bigger amoeba-like blob.
Anyway, something is true “locally” to a point if it’s true in that neighborhood. That means true for everything in that neighborhood. Which is what you’d expect. “Local” means just that. It’s the stuff that’s close to where we started out.
Often we would like to know something “globally”, which means … er … everywhere. Universally so. But it’s usually easier to prove a thing locally. I suppose having a point where we know something is so makes it easier to prove things about what’s nearby. Distant stuff, who knows?
“Local” serves as an adjective for many things. We think of a “local maximum”, for example, or “local minimum”. This is where whatever we’re studying has a value bigger (or smaller) than anywhere else nearby has. Or we speak of a function being “locally continuous”, meaning that we know it’s continuous near this point and we make no promises away from it. It might be “locally differentiable”, meaning we can take derivatives of it close to some interesting point. We say nothing about what happens far from it.
Unless we do. We can talk about something being “local to infinity”. Your first reaction to that should probably be to slap the table and declare that’s it, we’re done. But we can make it sensible, at least to other mathematicians. We do it by starting with a neighborhood that contains the origin, zero, that point in the middle of everything. So, what’s the inverse of that? It’s everything that’s far enough away from the origin. (Don’t include the boundary, we don’t need those headaches.) So why not call that the “neighborhood of infinity”? Other than that it’s a weird set of words to put together? And if something is true in that “neighborhood of infinity”, what is that thing other than true “local to infinity”?
I don’t blame you for being skeptical.
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