Who Needs Those Mean-Value Theorems, Anyway?

Ralph P. Boas

The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 12, No. 3. (Jun., 1981), pp. 178-181.

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Who Needs Those Mean-Value Theorems,
Anyway?
Ralph P. Boas

R. P. Boas was born in 1912 in Walla Walla, Washington,

received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1937, and was a National
Research Fellow during 1937-38, at Princeton and at Cam-
bridge (England). He has taught at Duke; the U. S. Navy
Pre-Flight School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Harvard; MIT;
and since 1950 at North western. During 1945-50 he was Exec-
utive Editor of "Mathematical Reviews. " He has published
articles in professional journals, three advanced books and the
Carus Monograph "A primer of real functions." He has held
various offices in both the AMS and MAA, and is currently the
Editor of the "American Mathematical Monthly. "

If we are to believe the textbooks, every student of calculus is supposed to learn the
mean-value theorem ("the law of the mean," as it was called when I was a student).
Let me remind you that this theorem says that iff is differentiable then

where c is some value between a and b, and we usually don't know any more about
where c actually is.
Geometrically this says that every chord has a parallel tangent: (Figure 1 once
appeared on the Graduate Record Examination with 5 suggested answers for the
question "Which theorem does the picture remind you of?")

Figure 1.

I claim, in common with Dieudonne ([5, pp. 142, 154]), that (I) enjoys too high a
status and that we would be better off with the mean-value inequality
( b - a)min f'(x) < f(b) - f(a) < (b - a)max f'(x) (2)
(where the max and min refer to the interval (a, b)).
 We can alternatively write (2) as

if we suppose, as is appropriate in a first course in calculus, that f is the integral of

its derivative (Figure 2).

max f'

graph
of f'

min f'

Figure 2.

The first advantage of (2) over (I) is that it avoids the perennial problem that we
can't say where the point c is on (a,b). Many students are bothered by the
indetermination. (They think that we could tell them where c is, if we only would.
This belief is only reinforced by exercises that ask them to find c in special cases.
Such exercises may be good for something else, but they don't help the understand-
ing of the mean-value theorem.)
Second, (2) is more intuitive than (I) if we think of x as time and f(x) as the
distance you have traveled up to time x. Then (1) says that at some instant you are
moving at exactly your average speed (cf. [3]). This seems not to be very intuitive.
But (2) says that the average speed is between the minimum speed and the
maximum speed, or that the distance traveled is no greater than the maximum
speed times the time, and no less than the minimum speed times the time; and what
could be more intuitive?
In the third place, most of the applications of (1) are in proofs of theorems. For
example, to prove that a function with a positive derivative increases, we argue that

Since f' is positive everywhere, it is positive at c, wherever c may be. Hence

f(b) > f(a).
But we can just as well appeal to (2):

f(b) - f(a) > (b - a ) a <min

x<b
f'(x) > 0,

and there is no reason (except for a century or two of tradition) for dragging in the
nebulous point c.
In any case, proving theorems ought not to be a principal aim (probably not even
a proper aim) of a first course in calculus. (Cf. [2] for further discussion of this
point.)
 Fourth, some textbooks (especially older ones) make much of (1) for computa-
tional purposes, preferring it to the tangent approximation, namely,

often written as
f(x + A x ) - f ( x ) =f ' ( x ) A x ,
or even as
dy =f'(x) dx.
The trouble with the tangent approximation is presumably that (4) provides no error
bounds, whereas (1) does provide them-but only via (2), and again it seems
simpler to use (2) directly instead of going around through (1).
However, this application no longer has much point for simple problems like
or sin61°, since such numbers can now be read from any decent pocket calculator
with more accuracy than most practical problems require.
One might expect that (2) would be useful for one of the many functions that
aren't (yet) available on calculators. Let us look at this possibility geometrically. If
we are working with an unfamiliar function, there is no reason why we might not
encounter a situation like Figure 3.

a b
Figure 3.
 In Figure 3, L, 'and L, are lines whose slopes are the minimum and maximum
slopes of the curve, drawn through the initial point (a, f(a)). The mean-value
theorem (in either form) tells us that the graph hits the vertical line x = b
somewhere between y , and y,. If f' happens to have a maximum or minimum
hiding somewhere between a and b, the distance between y , and y, might be
enormous; then we wouldn't get much information about f(b), and might not even
realize that we are not getting it. This situation (in a less extreme form than
indicated in Figure 3) occurs, for example, for the Bessel function J,, if we know J,
and J(,at x = 1.5 and 2.0 and want to estimate J, (1.9).
Finally, (1) is no longer true for vector-valued functions, whereas an appropriate
generalization of (2) is; see, for example, [5, p. 1541.
If the intermediate point c causes trouble in the ordinary mean-value theorem, it
causes even more trouble in the generalized mean-value theorem,

The applications of (5) demand that, although we don't know where c is, it must be
the same upstairs and downstairs. As far as I know, the only application of (5) in
elementary calculus is to Lhospital's rule (I give the Marquis his own spelling, even
if he did plagiarize the rule from John Bernoulli: see [8] or [9]).
Now, as somebody said, each generation has to make its own discoveries. One
such discovery ([6], 1923; [7], 1936; [I], 1969) is that the generalized mean-value
theorem (5) is utterly unnecessary for deriving Lhospital's rule at the elementary
calculus level. All you need is the idea of a limit and an integral inequality
something like (3), namely,
b
min h ( x ) i b g ' ( x ) dx ~ i ~ h ( x ) ~ 'dx
( xC )max h ( x ) i gl(x) dx, g'(x) >0 (6)

(this follows directly from the definition of the integral as the limit of a sum). In (6),
gl(x) plays the role of dx in (3), and h(x) takes the place of f'(x). All the effort that
previously went into proving and comprehending (5) can now be saved for under-
standing more fundamental principles. For details, see [I]. (I am not arguing against
using (5) to prove a more general form of the rule in a more advanced course.)
REFERENCES
R. P. Boas, Lhospital's rule without mean value theorems, Amer. Math. Monthly, 76 (1969)

1051-1053.

-, Calculus as an experimental science, Amer. Math. Monthly, 78 (1971) 664-667 = this

Journal, 2 (197 1) 36-39.

-, Travelers' surprises, this Journal, 10 (1979), 82-88.

T. J. I'A. Bromwich, An introduction to the theory of infinite series, Macmillan, London, 1st ed.,
1908, 2nd ed., 1926.
J. Dieudonne, Foundations of Modern Analysis, Academic Press, New York and London, 1960.
E. V. Huntington, Simplified proof of I'Hospital's theorem on indeterminate forms (abstract), Bull.
Amer. Math. Soc.,,,29 (1923) 207.
F. Lettenmeyer, Uber die sogenannte Hospitalsche Regel, J. Reine Angew. Math., 174 (1936)
246-247.
0. Spiess, ed., Der Briefwechsel von Johann Bernoulli, vol. 1, Birkhauser, Basel, 1955.
C. Truesdell, The new Bernoulli edition, Isis, 49 (1958) 54-62.