epäjatkuvan

Epäjatkuvan is the genitive singular form of the Finnish adjective epäjatkuva, meaning discontinuous or not continuous. The term is used mainly in mathematical and scientific Finnish to describe entities that do not maintain continuity on a given domain. Most often it refers to a function or a graph that is not continuous at one or more points, but it can also describe sequences, relations, or mappings that fail to be continuous.

In ordinary usage the adjective appears in compound phrases such as epäjatkuvan funktion raja-arvot or epäjatkuva käyrä, where epäjatkuvan modifies a noun in the genitive. A typical mathematical statement is that a function f is epäjatkuva at a point x0, meaning f is not continuous at x0. Finnish adjectives decline for case and number, so epäjatkuvan is the genitive singular form used when the noun it modifies is in genitive or when expressing possession.

Etymology: epä- is a negating prefix; jatkuva means “continuous” or “to continue.” The word thus literally means “not continuous.” It belongs to a broader terminological family that includes epäjatkuvuus (discontinuity) and related phrases used in topology, analysis, and applied sciences.