ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Vitali convergence theorem

Imagine you have a bunch of mathematical functions that are all very similar to each other. They might have slightly different shapes, but overall they behave pretty similarly. Now imagine that you want to figure out what happens when you add up all of these functions together.

The Vitali convergence theorem says that if these functions are "good enough," meaning they meet certain conditions, then you can add them up in a certain way and get an overall function that behaves even better than the original functions individually. Specifically, you can get a function that is continuous (meaning it doesn't have any sudden jumps or breaks) and that tends towards "zero" as you move away from a certain point.

But here's the catch: in order for this theorem to work, the functions you're adding up have to meet some pretty specific criteria. For example, they have to be "bounded" (meaning they don't grow too quickly or get too big), and they have to be uniformly continuous (meaning they don't have any sudden changes in behavior that depend on how close or far away you are from a certain point).

So basically, the Vitali convergence theorem tells you that if you have a bunch of good functions that act similarly, you can smoosh them all together in a special way to get an even better function that's nice and smooth. But it only works if the original functions are "well-behaved" in certain specific ways.