Distribution of weight of each term in the exponential function.

2019
Type : blog

Consider the exponential function

ex=1+x+x22+x36+x424+x5120+=n=0xnn! e^x = 1 + x + \frac{x^2}{2} + \frac{x^3}{6} + \frac{x^4}{24} + \frac{x^5}{120} + \cdots = \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{x^n}{n!}

it is evident that if you evaluate exe^x at two arbitrary real numbers x0<x1x_0 < x_1 that larger order terms in the taylor expansion are more important when you evaluate the the bigger term ex1e^{x_1} compared with the smaller term ex0e^{x_0}, but how exactly does the weight of the importance shift with different values of xx? I wanted to answer this question so I made this little gif, and the answer is surprisingly elegent: the dominant term of the taylor expansion is ek:kNe^k:k\in\mathbb N is kk, and the distrubution looks pretty poissonian! You can certainly see a trend, where the standard deviation which I very crudly approximated looks like it's tending towards the square root of the number at which the series is being evaluated :).

exp weight gif

Denali says: This makes sense because if you fix xx, then consider the ratio of the n plus one'th term and the n minus one'th term.

xn+1(n+1)!n!xn=xn+1\frac{x^{n+1}}{(n+1)!}\frac{n!}{x^n} = \frac{x}{n+1}

the n+1n+1 th term onle becomes more important than the nnth term when x>n+1x > n+1

You can find the above gif here, also if you'd like to see the source code it's in the same file in that repository.