Some questions related to the limit $\lim_{x \rightarrow \infty}(\lim_{y \rightarrow \infty} (\frac{x}{y}) )$

calculuslimitssequences-and-series

This is a relatively strange question, title says the original question. Intuition says this limit is 1, and graphing the function $f(x,y)=\frac{x}{y}$ this confirms it.
$$\lim_{x \rightarrow \infty}(\lim_{y \rightarrow \infty} (\frac{x}{y}) ) = 1$$

image of graph

I do not know how, but online calculators disagree. Wolfram alpha widgets seems to think that this limit doesn't exist and symbolab somehow ended up with 0.

However this is where I don't understand certain things. I encountered this issue in the context of converting an infinite sum to an integral.

It is known that an infinite sum can be often rewritten as a Reimann sum in the following way:

$$\int_{a}^{b}f(x)dx=\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}\sum_{k=1}^{n}(f(a+\frac{b-a}{n}k))\frac{b-a}{n}$$

Various numerical examples suggest that this is true. The next step is where I do not understand where I went wrong. It makes sense to think that if we are taking an integral from $0$ to $\infty$ we can write it in the following way:

$$\lim_{b \rightarrow \infty}\int_{0}^{b}f(x)dx=\lim_{b \rightarrow \infty}\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}\sum_{k=1}^{n}(f(\frac{b}{n}k))\frac{b}{n}$$

Since both limits go to infinity, the quantity of $\frac{b}{n}$ should go to one, as previously established. So I expected the following to hold:

$$\lim_{b \rightarrow \infty}\int_{0}^{b}f(x)dx=\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}\sum_{k=1}^{n}(f(k))$$

However, this apparently isn't true, according to numerical calculations. Consider the following infinite sum, stolen shamelessly from someone else's question:

$$\sum_{k=1}^{\infty}(\frac{1}{5^k+2})$$

Letting $f(x)=\frac{1}{5^k+2}$ we have:

$$\sum_{k=1}^{\infty}(\frac{1}{5^k+2})=\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}\sum_{k=1}^{n}(f(k))=\lim_{b \rightarrow \infty}\int_{0}^{b}f(x)dx=\lim_{b \rightarrow \infty}\int_{0}^{b}\frac{1}{5^x+2}dx$$
$$\sum_{k=1}^{\infty}(\frac{1}{5^k+2})=\int_{0}^{\infty}\frac{1}{5^x+2}dx$$

According to desmos, the RHS evaluates to ~0.3413 and the LHS evaluates to ~0.1898. So this begs the question of what I did wrong. For anyone interested, here are the images of $\int_{0}^{x}\frac{1}{5^{t}+2}dt$ and $\sum_{n=1}^{x}\left(\frac{1}{5^{n}+2}\right)$ in red and blue respectively, drawn by desmos.

image of graph

Best Answer

The problem you're running into is that limits are much more slippery in multiple variables. You have this two variable function $f(x,y)=x/y$. Somehow you want to ask "what does this function do as $x$ and $y$ both go to infinity?" The problem is that there are many ways to go off to infinity. For instance, we could march off along the line $y=x$, which seems to be what you've done. Restricting to this line, we have $$\lim_{x \to \infty} f(x,x) = \lim_{x \to \infty} 1 = 1.$$ But you could've gone off along the line $y=2x$ and gotten a limit $$\lim_{x \to \infty} f(x,2x) = \lim_{x \to \infty} 1/2 = 1/2.$$ Even worse, you could've gone off along a parabola $x=y^2$ and seen $$\lim_{y \to \infty} f(y^2,y) = \lim_{y \to \infty} y = \infty.$$

Another approach is that the limit $\lim_{x \to \infty, y \to \infty} f(x,y)$ should be the same as $\lim_{(x,y) \to (0,0)} f(1/x,1/y)$. But in your case $f(1/x,1/y)= y/x$, and this function clearly doesn't have a limit at the origin (nor is it defined there).