Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-year-1-of-the-computer-science-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2022/discrete-mathematics-continuous-mathematics-and-probability-resit/5/c/ii/solution

At , the gradient from the preceding part vanishes and the Hessian matrix is zero. The second-order test is therefore inconclusive. Instead inspect the eigenline:
For arbitrarily small positive and negative , these values have opposite signs. Thus is neither a local maximum nor a local minimum. In dimension at least two it is a degenerate saddle point; in one dimension it is a stationary inflection point. Looking only at the zero Hessian matrix would not determine this classification.

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