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Bernoulli's inequality

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An illustration of Bernoulli's inequality, with the graphs of and shown in red and blue respectively. Here,

In mathematics, Bernoulli's inequality (named after Jacob Bernoulli) is an inequality that approximates exponentiations of . It is often employed in real analysis. It has several useful variants:[1]

Integer exponent

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  • Case 1: for every integer and real number . The inequality is strict if and .
  • Case 2: for every integer and every real number .[2]
  • Case 3: for every even integer and every real number .

Real exponent

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  • for every real number and . The inequality is strict if and .
  • for every real number and .

History

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Jacob Bernoulli first published the inequality in his treatise "Positiones Arithmeticae de Seriebus Infinitis" (Basel, 1689), where he used the inequality often.[3]

According to Joseph E. Hofmann, Über die Exercitatio Geometrica des M. A. Ricci (1963), p. 177, the inequality is actually due to Sluse in his Mesolabum (1668 edition), Chapter IV "De maximis & minimis".[3]

Proof for integer exponent

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The first case has a simple inductive proof:

Suppose the statement is true for :

Then it follows that

Bernoulli's inequality can be proved for case 2, in which is a non-negative integer and , using mathematical induction in the following form:

  • we prove the inequality for ,
  • from validity for some r we deduce validity for .

For ,

is equivalent to which is true.

Similarly, for we have

Now suppose the statement is true for :

Then it follows that

since as well as . By the modified induction we conclude the statement is true for every non-negative integer .

By noting that if , then is negative gives case 3.

Generalizations

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Generalization of exponent

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The exponent can be generalized to an arbitrary real number as follows: if , then

for or , and

for .

This generalization can be proved by comparing derivatives. The strict versions of these inequalities require and .

Generalization of base

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Instead of the inequality holds also in the form where are real numbers, all greater than , all with the same sign. Bernoulli's inequality is a special case when . This generalized inequality can be proved by mathematical induction.

Proof

In the first step we take . In this case the inequality is obviously true.

In the second step we assume validity of the inequality for numbers and deduce validity for numbers.

We assume thatis valid. After multiplying both sides with a positive number we get:

As all have the same sign, the products are all positive numbers. So the quantity on the right-hand side can be bounded as follows:what was to be shown.

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The following inequality estimates the -th power of from the other side. For any real numbers and with , one has

where 2.718.... This may be proved using the inequality

Alternative form

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An alternative form of Bernoulli's inequality for and is:

This can be proved (for any integer ) by using the formula for geometric series: (using )

or equivalently

Alternative proofs

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Arithmetic and geometric means

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An elementary proof for and can be given using weighted AM-GM.

Let be two non-negative real constants. By weighted AM-GM on with weights respectively, we get

Note that

and

so our inequality is equivalent to

After substituting (bearing in mind that this implies ) our inequality turns into

which is Bernoulli's inequality.

Geometric series

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Bernoulli's inequality

(1)

is equivalent to

(2)

and by the formula for geometric series (using y = 1 + x) we get

(3)

which leads to

(4)

Now if then by monotony of the powers each summand , and therefore their sum is greater and hence the product on the LHS of (4).

If then by the same arguments and thus all addends are non-positive and hence so is their sum. Since the product of two non-positive numbers is non-negative, we get again (4).

Binomial theorem

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One can prove Bernoulli's inequality for x ≥ 0 using the binomial theorem. It is true trivially for r = 0, so suppose r is a positive integer. Then Clearly and hence as required.

Using convexity

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For the function is strictly convex. Therefore, for holds and the reversed inequality is valid for and .

Another way of using convexity is to re-cast the desired inequality to for real and real . This inequality can be proved using the fact that the function is concave, and then using Jensen's inequality in the form to give: which is the desired inequality.

Notes

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  1. ^ Brannan, D. A. (2006). A First Course in Mathematical Analysis. Cambridge University Press. p. 20. ISBN 9781139458955.
  2. ^ Excluding the case r = 0 and x = –1, or assuming that 00 = 1.
  3. ^ a b mathematics – First use of Bernoulli's inequality and its name – History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange

References

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