limit inferior
Let be a set of real numbers. Recall that a limitpoint of is a real number such that for all there exist infinitely many such that
We define , pronounced thelimit inferior of , to be the infimum of all the limitpoints of . If there are no limit points, we define the limitinferior to be .
The two most common notations for the limit inferior are
and
An alternative, but equivalent, definition is available in the case ofan infinite
sequence
of real numbers . Foreach , let be the infimum of the tail,
This construction produces anon-decreasing sequence
which either converges to its supremum, or diverges to .We define the limit inferior of the original sequence to be this limit;