Monday, 23 September 2019

real analysis - Why is ex not uniformly continuous on mathbbR?




It seems intuitively very clear that ex is not uniformly continuous on R. I'm looking to 'prove' it using ϵ-δ analysis though. I reason as follows:



Suppose ϵ>0; in fact, fix it to be ϵ=1.



For contradiction, suppose that δ>0 s.t. () |xy|<δ|exey|<ϵ=1 for x,yR.
Note that ex+δex=ex(eδ1). So, for x large enough (so that RHS >1), the relation () does not hold.



This is our contradiction, and so the exponential function is not uniformly continuous on R.



Is this reasoning correct and sufficient?




Thanks.


Answer



If you are truly looking for a rigorous answer then you need to justify the "So, for x large enough...".



For instance, here is a very rigorous solution along the lines you suggest:



Assume that ex is uniformly continuous on R. Let ϵ=1. Thus there is δ>0 such that for all x,yR if |xy|<δ then |exey|<1. Let a=δ/2. Since lim and since e^a-1>0 it follows that \lim_{x\to \infty }e^x(e^a-1)=\infty. Consequently, there is some x\in \mathbb {R} such that e^x(e^a-1)>1. However, taking y=x+a we have |x-y|<\delta while |e^x-e^y|=e^x(e^a-1)>1, a contradiction.


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