Re: HSC 2014 4U Marathon - Advanced Level
Okay, I don't think mine is elegant or quick, it is just that I don't think we don't need to know anything more detailed about the definition/properties of the exponential than is taught in the syllabus.
First note that
trivially, because base tends to 1 and exponent tends to 0. So it suffices to consider the expression
If we divide and multiply this by
we are left with the product of something that tends to 1 from knowledge of the sin(x)/x as x -> 0 limit and
For sufficiently large x this quantity is smaller that 1 (as the inside is smaller than 1 and we are raising to a positive power). For sufficiently large x it is also bounded below by
The constants are obviously irrelevant as the exponentiation sends them to 1 in the limit as x-> inf.
Finally
where the first limit is a HSC assumption (*) for graphing purposes I am pretty sure. (Is it in the 3U book somewhere?) The idea is that logs grow much slower than any positive power.
Putting this all together finishes the proof by the squeeze law.
Just for the sake of completeness, I will include a sketch of a proof of assumption (*):
The assumption is equivalent to showing that
But
by integrating
twice from 0 to x. That a quadratic expression dominates a linear one is clear from dividing numerator and denominator by x.