Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Suggestion for answer to Question 16 #5

Open
biscarri1 opened this issue Dec 9, 2020 · 0 comments
Open

Suggestion for answer to Question 16 #5

biscarri1 opened this issue Dec 9, 2020 · 0 comments

Comments

@biscarri1
Copy link

biscarri1 commented Dec 9, 2020

First, thanks for creating this doc! I'm in the process of preparing for interviews currently and it's been extremely useful.

I wanted to suggest an alternative solution to problem 16 that I find a bit more intuitive than the one provided. It's effectively the same, but I think it follows a smoother train of thought since it beings with the reflex that many people have of immediately taking ln() when they see an expression with an exponential. I've pasted the LaTeX for the solution below.

Begin by considering,
%
\begin{align*}
    f(x) = ln(x^{x}) = xln(x).
\end{align*}
%
Then we have,
%
\begin{align*}
    f'(x) = ln(x) + 1.
\end{align*}
%
For any function, $g$, we have by the chain rule,
%
\begin{align*}
    \frac{d}{dx}g(x^{x}) = g'(x^{x})\frac{d}{dx}x^{x}.
\end{align*}
%
If we let $g = f$, and rearrange the above we get,
%
\begin{align*}
   \frac{d}{dx}x^{x} &= \frac{\frac{d}{dx}f(x^{x})}{f'(x^{x})} \\ 
   &= \frac{ln(x)+1}{\frac{1}{x^{x}}} \\
   &= x^{x}(ln(x)+1).
\end{align*}
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant