cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Community Tip - Help us improve the PTC Community by taking this short Community Survey! X

What good is inf?

JohnRudnicki
15-Moonstone

What good is inf?

In the little program attached, I had inf in the if statement where I now have 10^3. When I had inf, the program ground away and then crashed the worksheet. 10^3 is plenty big enough for my case, but then I wondered what good is inf and when is it useful?

ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

John Rudnicki wrote:

In the little program attached, I had inf in the if statement where I now have 10^3. When I had inf, the program ground away and then crashed the worksheet. 10^3 is plenty big enough for my case, but then I wondered what good is inf and when is it useful?

The Infinity symbol is most commonly used in symbolic integration, where it is treated as a symbolic infinity and not as just a Very Large Number. It is occasionally useful for returning a value when an operation might, say, result in an error at a singularity; for example, it might be used to represent the result of a n/0 operation.

For graphing purposes, adn depending upon the exact version of Mathcad that you have, you could replace your -103 with the built-in constant NaN. This is used to represent a missing or faulted value in a data set and has the distinct advantage of being skipped in 2D graphs. If you have NaN, then try it.

Stuart

View solution in original post

3 REPLIES 3

John Rudnicki wrote:

In the little program attached, I had inf in the if statement where I now have 10^3. When I had inf, the program ground away and then crashed the worksheet. 10^3 is plenty big enough for my case, but then I wondered what good is inf and when is it useful?

The Infinity symbol is most commonly used in symbolic integration, where it is treated as a symbolic infinity and not as just a Very Large Number. It is occasionally useful for returning a value when an operation might, say, result in an error at a singularity; for example, it might be used to represent the result of a n/0 operation.

For graphing purposes, adn depending upon the exact version of Mathcad that you have, you could replace your -103 with the built-in constant NaN. This is used to represent a missing or faulted value in a data set and has the distinct advantage of being skipped in 2D graphs. If you have NaN, then try it.

Stuart

Thanks.

No worries, John.

Stuart

Announcements

Top Tags