Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2006/paper-2/12/b/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 1 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge 2006 Paper 2 12 b Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
At with , differentiating the gradient yields the Hessian matrix . At the positive point it is negative definite, and at the negative point it is positive-definite; in both cases and . Therefore the positive point is a maximum, the negative point is a minimum, and there are no saddle points.
They are global extrema: with , the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality gives , with equality at exactly those two points. This is the extremum bound underlying the level sets of a linear numerator over a radial quadratic.
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