Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2021 / ib / Paper 4 / 17H / a

Here $X$ has the binomial distribution $\mathrm{Bin}(n,\theta )$, so, up to a factor independent of $\theta$, the likelihood function isFor $0<X<n$, differentiating the log-likelihood givesand the boundary cases give the same formula. Thus the binomial proportion maximum-likelihood estimator is