Skepticism concerning Heaviside’s “Cover-up Method” for partial fraction decomposition

algebra-precalculusfractionspartial fractionspolynomials

I was reading this paper from MIT and it introduces Heaviside’s Cover-up Method for partial fraction decomposition. In that paper in Example $1$ it solves a problem using that method and just when explaining why it works (on the same page-1) it says-

Why does the method work? The reason is simple. The “right” way to
determine $A$ from equation $(1)$ would be to multiply both sides by $(x −1)$ ; this would give $$\frac{x − 7}{ ~~~~~~~~~(x + 2)}
= A + \frac{B}{ x + 2} (x − 1) ~~~~~~~~\qquad(4)$$

Now if we substitute $x = 1$, what we get is exactly equation $(2)$, since
the term on the right disappears.

Which seems absurd to me since multiplying both sides by $x-1$ should render that $x \neq 1$ otherwise it would mean $\frac{0}{0}$ is equal to $1$ because we could've written $A$ as such $\frac{A\cdot(x-1)}{x-1}$ and substituting by $x = 1$ would give us $\frac{A\cdot 0}{0}$. I looked over other places too where this method is used but those more or less follows the same way.

Note that I read few questions about it on this site eg,. this answer.

Can someone please help me make sense of it? Any help is genuinely appreciated.

Best Answer

I've at last found what I was looking for and contributed the answer.

$A(x+2)+B(x-1)$ is a polynomial in $x$, as is $x-7$. I wanted values of $A$ and $B$ that make these two polynomials equal for all real numbers except $1$ and $-2$. But polynomials are continuous and so two polynomials that agree at infinitely many real numbers are necessarily identically equal and will therefore agree at all real numbers. In particular, $A(x+2)+B(x-1)$ will hold at $x=1$ and $x=-2$ if it holds at all other integers, so we can substitute $x=1$ and $x=-2$ as shortcuts to finding the correct values of $A$ and $B$.

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