Funny Questions in Calculus

Fedor Duzhin
September 24, 2008

Question 1 The count Dracula awakes on night 0 and his evil after-life begins. On
night 1 Dracula starts biting people. Every bitten human becomes a vampire and
bites people as well. Let v(n) be the vampire population after nth night. Investigate
the function v(n) in the following cases:

(a) Every vampire bites one human every night starting the first night after the
initiation. Write down a recurrent and an explicit formula for v(n).

(b) Every vampire bites one human every night starting the second night after
the initiation. Write down a recurrent formula for v(n). Prove that
 n+2  n+2
1+ 5
2
12 5
v(n) =
5

(c) Every vampire bites m humans on mth night after the initiation. Write down
a recurrent and an explicit formula for v(n).

Question 2 In the land of Fantasia, the Inquisition tortures and executes D% of

the population each year. The natural growth of the population is B% per year.
Express the population after nth year by an explicit formula in n. Prove that

(a) If D > B, then Fantasians are doomed to perish.

(b) If D = B, then the population remains constant.

(c) If D < B, then the population is going to grow unboundedly.

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 Figure 1: Top view of the Millennium Falcon in a hangar

Question 3 A Colombian drug lord plans to bribe some police officers so that
they will let his cocaine pass the boundary freely. He knows that the more officers
he bribes, the more cocaine he can transfer. Let the fraction of bought officers
be x [0, 1], and let f (x) [0, 1] be the fraction of the total cocaine harvest not
intercepted.
Naturally the function f is increasing and f (1) = 1. Indeed, if the whole police
is bought than nothing prevents the cocaine from crossing the border.
Suppose that the cocaine is C worth and the whole police costs P. Calculate
the maximal income and find out how much police the drug lord should bribe if
1 2
f (x) = + arctan x.
2
Why is in this formula? Well the coca grew on a round field.

Question 4 Han Solo is going to build a hangar for his spacecraft the Millennium
Falcon. The hangar is to be designed as follows. Its front door is a segment of the
line y = 0, its back wall is a parabola y = a bx2 for some positive parameters
a, b, so the shape of the hangar is defined by the inequality

0 y a bx2 .

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The launch platform is a rectangle of dimension 2 by 3 located in the centre of the
hangar as shown in Figure 1.
Find the minimal possible floor area of the hangar.
Question 5 A crazy alien robot lands on a road and starts moving along it. On
the nth day after the arrival it walks
50 cos n
an =
ln(n + 1)
kilometres. If n is even, then the robot goes East, otherwise it goes West. Prove
that the robot is approaching a certain point (so humans can, for example, place
there a machine radiating a destruction ray to annihilate the evil being).
What can you say if the robot never changes direction but walks an kilometres
East every day?
Question 6 An alien lady misses each of her m husbands such that her anguish is
proportional to the square of the distance from her to a husband. In other words,
the total anguish is d12 + + dm2 , where di is the distance between the lady and the
i th husband.
The lady lives on the surface of the planet, that is, a unit sphere x2 +y2 +z2 = 1.
The husbands work in the space and/or underground, so the i th guy is staying at
the point (xi , yi , zi ). Where on the planets surface should the lady stay to minimise
the total anguish?
Question 7 Dr Fedor wants to become the world dictator in order to execute all
bad people and establish the reign of good and justice.
He wants to achieve the great goal by catching the Golden Fish. The Golden
Fish grants three wishes. It is known that if a man applies to rule the Sea, then the
Golden Fish rejects such a wish, so we are pretty sure that the world dictatorship
would be too much for one wish, too. Thus Dr Fedor cannot ask for more than to
be the leader of a particular country. It is not very clear how many countries there
are, but the UN has 192 member states and its definitely enough to take over all
of them, so Dr Fedor has to catch 64 Golden Fishes to complete the quest.
Dr Fedor has a net of a hemispherical shape shown in Figure 2. The equation
defining the net is
x2 + y2 + z2 = 9, x0
measured in m. It is known (from geography) that the field of velocities of the sea
water around the net is
V = i + ez cos yj + (1 + ez sin y)k

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 Figure 2: Hemispherical net

measured in cm/s. It is also known (from biology) that in order to catch a Golden
Fish, one has to process 1km3 of water.
How long it will take of Dr Fedor to take over the world?