Bounded Functions

A schematic illustration of a bounded function (red) and an unbounded one (blue). Intuitively, the graph of a bounded function stays within a horizontal band, while the graph of an unbounded function does not.

A function f defined on some set X with real or complex values is called bounded if the set of its values is bounded. In other words, there exists a real number M such that

|f(x)|\leq M

for all x in X.^[1] A function that is not bounded is said to be unbounded.Template:Citation needed

If f is real-valued and f(x) ≤ A for all x in X, then the function is said to be bounded (from) above by A. If f(x) ≥ B for all x in X, then the function is said to be bounded (from) below by B. A real-valued function is bounded if and only if it is bounded from above and below.^[1]Template:Additional citation needed

An important special case is a bounded sequence, where X is taken to be the set N of natural numbers. Thus a sequence f = (a₀, a₁, a₂, ...) is bounded if there exists a real number M such that

|a_{n}|\leq M

for every natural number n. The set of all bounded sequences forms the sequence space $l^{\infty }$ .Template:Citation needed

The definition of boundedness can be generalized to functions f : X → Y taking values in a more general space Y by requiring that the image f(X) is a bounded set in Y.Template:Citation needed

Related notions

Weaker than boundedness is local boundedness. A family of bounded functions may be uniformly bounded.

A bounded operator T : X → Y is not a bounded function in the sense of this page's definition (unless T = 0), but has the weaker property of preserving boundedness: Bounded sets M ⊆ X are mapped to bounded sets T(M) ⊆ Y. This definition can be extended to any function f : X → Y if X and Y allow for the concept of a bounded set. Boundedness can also be determined by looking at a graph.

Examples

The sine function sin : R → R is bounded since $|\sin(x)|\leq 1$ for all $x\in \mathbf {R}$ .

The function $f(x)=(x^{2}-1)^{-1}$ , defined for all real x except for −1 and 1, is unbounded. As x approaches −1 or 1, the values of this function get larger and larger in magnitude. This function can be made bounded if one considers its domain to be, for example, [2, ∞) or (−∞, −2].

The function ${\textstyle f(x)=(x^{2}+1)^{-1}}$ , defined for all real x, is bounded.

The inverse trigonometric function arctangent defined as: y = $arctan(x)$ or x = $tan(y)$ is increasing for all real numbers x and bounded with −Template:Sfrac < y < Template:Sfrac radians.
By the boundedness theorem, every continuous function on a closed interval, such as f : [0, 1] → R, is bounded. More generally, any continuous function from a compact space into a metric space is bounded.

All complex-valued functions f : C → C which are entire are either unbounded or constant as a consequence of Liouville's theorem. In particular, the complex sin : C → C must be unbounded since it is entire.

The function f which takes the value 0 for x rational number and 1 for x irrational number (cf. Dirichlet function) is bounded. Thus, a function does not need to be "nice" in order to be bounded. The set of all bounded functions defined on [0, 1] is much larger than the set of continuous functions on that interval. Moreover, continuous functions need not be bounded; for example, the functions $g:\mathbb {R} ^{2}\to \mathbb {R}$ and $h:(0,1)^{2}\to \mathbb {R}$ defined by $g(x,y):=x+y$ and $h(x,y):={\frac {1}{x+y}}$ are both continuous, but neither is bounded. (However, a continuous function must be bounded if its domain is both closed and bounded.)