Can an arc of a parabola inside a circle of radius 1 have a length greater than 4?
Solution
The answer is yes. Consider the arc of the parabola inside the circle , where we initially assume that . This intersects the circle in three points, and . We claim that for sufficiently large, the length of the parabolic arc between and is greater than , which implies the desired result by symmetry. We express using the usual formula for arclength:
where we have artificially introduced into the integrand in the last step. Now, for ,
since diverges, so does . Hence, for sufficiently large , we have , and hence .
Note: a numerical computation shows that one must take to obtain , and that the maximum value of is about , achieved for .
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