While reading John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession I came across the following statement (clearly explained on pp. 74):
Any positive power of
eventually increases more slowly than any positive power of
.
It is easy to prove this (existence) analytically, by taking derivative to compare slopes. But algebraically it implies that (for example):
There are either no real solution or two real solutions of the equation
for any given.
Now the question that arises is “How to find this ?” I had no idea about how to solve such logarithmic equations, so I took help of Google and discovered this Mathematic.SE post. So, we put
and re-write the equation as:
Now to be able to use Lambert W function (also called the product logarithm function) we need to re-write the above equation, but I have failed to do so.
But using WolframAlpha I was able to solve to get
(which is an imaginary number, i.e. no real solution of this equation) but I was not able to figure out the steps involved. So if you have any idea about the general method or the special case of higher exponents, please let me know.