Monday, 28 November 2016

calculus - Why do second or higher derivatives work for finding concavity and inflection points?

Say we have the function f(x)=(x2)3+3, whose graph is
enter image description here



and we want to find at what regions does f have a positive/negative concavity, and where the inflection points are.



I learned to answer these questions doing:
f(x)=3(x2)2f
\therefore
Concavity is positive within (2, \infty), negative within (- \infty, 2)
Inflection point(s): (2, 3)



But why does this work? Will I have issues when the function has multiple inflection points or do I just have to be more careful? And what if the degree of a function were very high, say of degree 6? Would I have to keep computing the derivative until I get a derivative of degree 1 or does it only take until the second derivative?

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