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Concept
Uniform convergence
Summary
In the mathematical field of analysis, uniform convergence is a mode of convergence of functions stronger than pointwise convergence. A sequence of functions converges uniformly to a limiting function on a set as the function domain if, given any arbitrarily small positive number , a number can be found such that each of the functions differs from by no more than at every point in . Described in an informal way, if converges to uniformly, then the rate at which approaches is "uniform" throughout its domain in the following sense: in order to show that uniformly falls within a certain distance of , we do not need to know the value of in question — there can be found a single value of independent of , such that choosing will ensure that is within of for all . In contrast, pointwise convergence of to merely guarantees that for any given in advance, we can find (i.e., can depend on the value of ) such that, for that particular , falls within of whenever (a different requiring a different for pointwise convergence).
The difference between uniform convergence and pointwise convergence was not fully appreciated early in the history of calculus, leading to instances of faulty reasoning. The concept, which was first formalized by Karl Weierstrass, is important because several properties of the functions , such as continuity, Riemann integrability, and, with additional hypotheses, differentiability, are transferred to the limit if the convergence is uniform, but not necessarily if the convergence is not uniform.
In 1821 Augustin-Louis Cauchy published a proof that a convergent sum of continuous functions is always continuous, to which Niels Henrik Abel in 1826 found purported counterexamples in the context of Fourier series, arguing that Cauchy's proof had to be incorrect. Completely standard notions of convergence did not exist at the time, and Cauchy handled convergence using infinitesimal methods. When put into the modern language, what Cauchy proved is that a uniformly convergent sequence of continuous functions has a continuous limit.
Official source
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