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Answer by Sammy Black for Proving a function isn't bounded

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The formulas that you've written actually prove something stronger, namely that$$\lim_{x \to 0}\; \biggl\lvert \frac1x \biggr\rvert = \infty.$$

To establish that $f(x) = \frac1x$ is unbounded, we have to show that it is either unbounded from above or from below. The following applies to the upper bound, but everything works mutatis mutandis to show that for this function there's no lower bound either.

For each potential upper bound $M$, we have to demonstrate that there's some$x$ in the domain of $f$ such that $f(x) > M$. Your formulas show that it suffices to choose any$x \in \smash{\bigl(0, \frac1M \bigr)}$, but such a universal quantifier isn't strictly necessary here. In other words, we just need an example point $x$ rather than all possible $x$ in a neighborhood of $0$.


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