this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Daily Maths Challenges
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I've posted my solution.
The question of why the bounds swap isn't too relevant to the problem, since there are no maxes or mins below x = 1 - but the reason they swap is because numbers between 0 and 1 get larger with smaller powers, and smaller with larger powers. Think of how 0.5^2 = 0.25 - so the more a (positive) power is biased toward "rooting" a number in this interval (biased toward 0), the larger the result will be - so the minimum of g now produces a max value, and the max of g yields a minimum value.
Edit: If it helps, you can also think of numbers between 0 and 1 as being numbers larger than 1, but with a negative power. So something like 0.5^2 is equivalent to (2^-1)^2 = 2^-2. So larger powers become lesser powers that way.
Really, it's for the same reason the graphs of 2^x and 0.5^x are reflections of each other