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# A function of rational proportions

Give an example of a differentiable function such that for each it holds and .

Solution

Let us define

and extend it periodically to all of . Specifically and hence has zeroes all the integers. We also note that is differentiable and the derivative is given by . The only thing we have to check is the differentiability of the function at the odd integers. But that is quite easy since

Let us define the function under question as

(1)

The above sum converges uniformly because the nominator is bounded. We can also differentiate term by term since the series of also converges uniformly.

All that remains now is to prove that , the way it is defined , has the requested properties. Let be a rational number. For all that are greater or equal to the denominator of , is rational. Hence , . This in return means that the sum in for rational is a finite rational sum , hence rational as we wanted.

All that remains now is to prove that . What we are using is a slightly variant of the well known proof that is irrational.  Indeed , let where are integers. Without loss of generality , let us suppose that they are positive. Thus, for a suitable large natural number we have that is an integer and

However , the last is a contradiction since the LHS is an integers and the RHS is less than . This completes the proof.