# Is 1/x a Continuous Function?

So this is a question I got by way of a friend. It’s got me thinking because there is an obviously right answer. And there’s an answer that you get to if you think about it longer. And then longer still and realize there are several answers you could give. So I wanted to put it out to my audience. Figuring out your answer and why you stand on that is the interesting bit.

The question is as asked in the subject line: is $\frac{1}{x}$ a continuous function?

Mathematics majors, or related people like physics majors, already understand the question. Other people will want to know what the question means. This includes people who took a class calculus class, who remember three awful weeks where they had to write ε and δ a lot. The era passed, even if they did not. And people who never took a mathematics class, but like their odds at solving a reasoning problem, can get up to speed on this fast.

The colloquial idea of a “continuous function” is, well. Imagine drawing a curve that represents the function. Can you draw the whole thing without lifting your pencil off the page? That is, no gaps, no jumps? Then it’s continuous. That’s roughly the idea we want to capture by talking about a “continuous function”. It needs some logical rigor to pass as mathematics, though. So here we go.

A function is continuous if, and only if, it’s continuous at every point in the function’s domain. That I start out with that may inspire a particular feeling. That feeling is, “our Game Master grinned ear-to-ear and took out four more dice and a booklet when we said we were sure”.

But our best definition of continuity builds on functions at particular points. Which is fair. We can imagine a function that’s continuous in some places but that’s not continuous somewhere else. The ground can be very level and smooth right up to the cliff. And we have a nice, easy enough, idea of what it is to be continuous at a point.

I’ll get there in a moment. My life will be much easier if I can give you some more vocabulary. They’re all roughly what you might imagine the words meant if I didn’t tell you they were mathematics words.

The first is ‘map’. A function ‘maps’ something in its domain to something in its range. Like if ‘a’ is a point in the domain, ‘f’ maps that point to ‘f(a)’, in its range. Like, if your function is ‘f(x) = x2‘, then f maps 2 to 4. It maps 3 to 9. It maps -2 to 4 again, and that’s all right. There’s no reason you can’t map several things to one thing.

The next is ‘image’. Take something in the domain. It might be a single point. It might be a couple of points. It might be an interval. It might be several intervals. It’s a set, as big or as empty as you like. The `image’ of that set is all the points in the range that any point in the original set gets mapped to. So, again play with f(x) = x2. The image of the interval from 0 to 2 is the interval from 0 to 4. The image of the interval from 3 to 4 is the interval from 9 to 16. The image of the interval from -3 to 1 is the interval from 0 to 9.

That’s as much vocabulary as I need. Thank you for putting up with that. Now I can say what it means to be continuous at a point.

Is a function continuous at a point? Let me call that point ‘a’? It is continuous at ‘a’ we can do this. Take absolutely any open set in the range that contains ‘f(a)’. I’m going to call that open set ‘R’. Is there an open set, that I’ll call ‘D’, inside the domain, that contains ‘a’, and with an image that’s inside ‘R’? ‘D’ doesn’t have to be big. It can be ridiculously tiny; it just has to be an open set. If there always is a D like this, no matter how big or how small ‘R’ is, then ‘f’ is continuous at ‘a’. If there is not — if there’s even just the one exception — then ‘f’ is not continuous at ‘a’.

I realize that’s going back and forth a lot. It’s as good as we can hope for, though. It does really well at capturing things that seem like they should be continuous. And it never rules as not-continuous something that people agree should be continuous. It does label “continuous” some things that seem like they shouldn’t be. We accept this because not labelling continuous stuff as non-continuous is worse.

And all this talk about open sets and images gets a bit abstract. It’s written to cover all kinds of functions on all kinds of things. It’s hard to master, but, if you get it, you’ve got a lot of things. It works for functions on all kinds of domains and ranges. And it doesn’t need very much. You need to have an idea of what an ‘open set’ is, on the domain and range, and that’s all. This is what gives it universality.

But it does mean there’s the challenge figuring out how to start doing anything. If we promise that we’re talking about a function with domain and range of real numbers we can simplify things. This is where that ε and δ talk comes from. But here’s how we can define “continuous at a point” for a function in the special case that its domain and range are both real numbers.

Take any positive ε. Is there is some positive δ, so that, whenever ‘x’ is a number less than δ away from ‘a’, we know that f(x) is less than ε away from f(a)? If there always is, no matter how large or small ε is, then f is continuous at a. If there ever is not, even for a single exceptional ε, then f is not continuous at a.

That definition is tailored for real-valued functions. But that’s enough if you want to answer the original question. Which, you might remember, is, “is 1/x a continuous function”?

That I ask the question, for a function simple and familiar enough a lot of people don’t even need to draw it, may give away what I think the answer is. But what’s interesting is, of course, why the answer. So I’ll leave that for an essay next week.

## Author: Joseph Nebus

I was born 198 years to the day after Johnny Appleseed. The differences between us do not end there. He/him.

## 5 thoughts on “Is 1/x a Continuous Function?”

1. Downpuppy says:

So, what’s the domain?

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1. I’d guess the domain is the non-zero reals. So it’s continuous on the + & – sides. Continuity outside the domain is inconceivable.

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1. I apologize for answering late; I got hit with a busier couple weeks than I wanted. But yes, my sense is that the domain has to be the non-zero reals, which implies the answer to whether it’s a continuous function.

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