Page 202 - The Manga Guide to Biochemistry

But we can’t make calculations using infinity, right? So what can we do?

It’s no problem. We’ll just use a little trick. We can take advantage of the fact that
the reciprocal of infinity is zero. In other words, when we take the reciprocal, we
know that the y-axis value is Vmax when the x-axis is zero!

1
Although, actually, the numerical value of the y-axis at this time is Vmax .

It looks a little something like this:
y-axis

Vmax

x-axis
∞ (infinity)

Step 1
When the x-axis value is infinity, the y-axis value is Vmax.
Since infinity is too abstract for our calculations, we need to replace it with
something that makes sense in the real world, so we just take the reciprocals of
the values for both the x- and y-axes.

188 Chapter 4