Assignment 7:

ex
1) Find absolute extrema for y=f ( x )=x+ on [0.5,5]
x
Solution:
ex
f ( x )=x +
x

First we find its derivative:

' ( x e x −e x )
f ( x )=1+
x2

This is tricky part. Even your calculator isn’t likely going to give you the exact solution for
f’(x)=0 within in the interval of [0.5,5] and you are surely not going to get zero here using
analytical approach (the way we usually solve problems).

Since, I didn’t write method and this is not exam so you can use plots to first visualize how the derivative
of the function looks in that interval (You can use google as we did in class or you can use any tool):

We can see that it is closed to zero but we aren’t sure where it is going slight negative or
zero or slight positive near x= 0.7.

For that we can narrow down our search:

We can see that at around x=0.74, the derivative f’(x) looks closed to zero. Now we can use this point
along with border points to find absolute maxima and minima in the interval

0.5 ≤ x ≤ 5.

f(0.5)= 3.7974425414002564
f(5)=34.68263182051532 (maxima)
f(0.74)= 3.5723452898572488 (minima)

Now we visually see the function, if it makes sense:

And if we zoomed in at x=0.7-0.8 region, we can see that minima is at around x=0.74.
 We can easily see that x=5 is our maxima point but minima is a bit tricky as we can see in the
plot and from both f(x) calculations at x=0.5 and x=0.74 that f(x) here are very close so we
zoom a bit here:

3) Find absolute extrema for y=f ( x )=ln ( 3 x 2 )+ e3 x −ln ⁡(4 x 2 +2 x) on [0.5,5]

Solution:

First find the derivative:

2 4 x+ 1
f ' (x )= +3 e 3 x − 2
x 2x +x
Since, I didn’t write method and this is not exam so you can use plots to first visualize how
the derivative of the function looks in that interval (You can use google as we did in class or
you can use any tool):

From the distant, it looks the values are close to zero as we look at values close to 0.5.
However, you need to see the scale which shows 1e7 which is another way of writing
10000000. This means we need to zoom in a bit to see how it looks like.
 We can see in this plot that values are still increasing but since we are using exponential
growth so the change is of so large scales that these earlier values looked almost the same
size and looked almost zero in previous plot. But here we can see the increasing trend and
no point becoming zero or undefined so no critical points in [0,0.5] interval.

We can see that the derivative of the function doesn’t have a point which is zero or undefined at
any value between [0.5, 5] which is the requirement to find the critical points.

Next thing we can do is to check values on borders:

At x=0.5,

f(0.5)= 3.5008598173263383 (minima)

f(5)=3269016.9894798584 (maxima)
Here, we can see that the function is keep increasing in the given interval.