Intuitively, the graph of is obtained by taking the graph of , chopping off the part under the x-axis, and letting take the value zero there.
Similarly, the negative part of f is defined as
Note that both f+ and f− are non-negative functions. A peculiarity of terminology is that the 'negative part' is neither negative nor a part (like the imaginary part of a complex number is neither imaginary nor a part).
The function f can be expressed in terms of f+ and f− as
Also note that
Using these two equations one may express the positive and negative parts as