1.1.8 Proving the Second-Order Conditions
Figure 1.6: The graph of an increasing function
f
(a) > 0 is not enough to guarantee that f (x) increases in a neighborhood of a. f(x) may suffer
from oscillations that persist arbitrarily close to a (see Figure 1.1). If we want to use a derivative to show
that a function is increasing, we need to know the derivative is positive at every point on an interval.
Lemma 1.11
If f
(x) > 0 for all x on an interval I, then f (x) is increasing on I.
To prove this lemma, we need to show that when f
(x) > 0, the function satisfies the formal
definition of increasing that we saw above. This is surprisingly arduous to prove using the definition of
a derivative as our starting point. Here are two deceptively short proofs
Proof
Suppose a < b. Apply the fundamental theorem of calculus: f (b)f (a) =
Z
b
a
f
(x) dx. The integrand
is positive over all of [a, b], so the integral is positive too. Thus f (b) > f(a).
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