heybashme said:
Quick question is proof by contradiction for some inequalities a legitimate way of proving an inequality is true in an exam?
Done correctly -> yes.
In particular, with inequalities.. they usually want you to prove that
LHS < RHS
where LHS and RHS depends on some parameter(s) say x.
so the statement they want you to prove is
for all x, LHS(x) < RHS(x)
to prove it by contradiction, you would first assume that
there exist a particular x, such that
LHS(x) >= RHS(x)
and derive a contradiction from there.. problem is usually this will be quite hard/ more tedious.