FEEDBACK ON WEEK 4 TEST, 2017

I was reasonably pleased by the outcome of this test the average was
around 14.4/20, which translates to approximately 72%; so many of you will
have a good platform for the rest of the course. Any mark between 16 and
20 is good, but less than 10 implies that serious work is required to pass the
May/June examination. Whatever your mark, please dont get complacent,
because there is plenty more that needs to be understood. New concepts,
definitions, propositions and theorems have to be learned and practised before
you can start to speak the language of metric spaces properly.

Question 1
Most of you did this question well, although the following errors were rather
common; by themselves they did not necessarily lead to loss of marks.

(a) was about the case n = 2, not arbitrary n

(b) requires x, y, z X, or some equivalent statement; it is simply not cor-

rect without

(c) is about an arbitrary metric d, not the Euclidean metric |x y| on R

(d) requires x, y X, or some equivalent statement, exactly as in (b)

(e) also requires x, y X, or equivalent; and just as importantly, the in-

equalities are for positive reals (say h and k) it is seriously incorrect
to specify h and k only as reals (or positive integers!)

Question 2
Firstly, it is vital you understand that a bounded function on [0, 1] (or any other
closed interval) need not attain its bounds for example f : [0, 1] R defined
by (
x for 0 x < 1
f (x) =
0 for x = 1
has supx[0,1] f (x) = 1, but maxx[0,1] f (x) is not defined. On the other hand,
if f is continuous on [0, 1], then (as we shall learn soon) f attains its bounds;
so max exists, and equals sup. The same is true if f is monotonic.
So we cannot use maxima to define dsup on B[0, 1]; but once we know that
some particular f is differentiable (and hence continuous), it is permissible to
find its sup (=max) using calculus. Remember, however, this method may fail
if the maximum is at a boundary point. For example, dsup (p1 , 0) = 1 (where 0
denotes the zero function), because maxx[0,1] |x 0| = 1 is attained at x = 1;
yet d(x 0)/dx = 1 is never 0.
Secondly, many of you wrote what looked like random statements and formu-
lae, often dotted around the page, without any connecting logic at all. Offering
no implications or reasoning is just as incorrect as producing implications that
go the wrong way; the outcome is not mathematics, and makes it impossible
for the reader (or marker) to decide whether or not you know what you are
doing. Every 2nd year student in a mathematics course must be aware of these
facts they are especially important when studying metric spaces!
Thirdly, at some point or other, a small minority of you assumed that, if
P Q and Q is true, then P is true. This, of course, is the road to
mathematical ruin; but how do I stop you taking it?
More specific points include:

(a) Several of you confused a function f with its value f (x) at some point (or
points) x; in most circumstances, this distinction really matters.
Please check out the notes for a correct proof of the triangle inequality.
You need to be clear why you can introduce the three suprema into your
expression; it is not in general true that

sup(A(x) + B(x)) = sup A(x) + sup B(x).

[0,1] [0,1] [0,1]

Many students forgot to mention exp at all; please always read the ques-
tion carefully!

(b) Once you have decided that these problems can be solved using calculus
(see the general remarks above), you have to give some explanation as to
why you have found the maximum. Computing the 2nd derivative is the
easiest to get right, but I attempted to give credit to everyone who tried
to write something down, however short. I did not deduct more than two
marks for missing this out in all three cases.
Some of you struggled with square roots, and decided that 1/4 is the
square root of 1/2 - or some such. I wanted to be generous about this,
but it seriously messed up your formulae in many cases.
A few of you even switched to the l1 metric for this part, and began to
integrate the relevant differences. I have no explanation for this but I
may have given a little bit of credit (by offsetting some other minor error)
for managing to carry out the integrations accurately.

Nige Ray
10 March 2017