This section contains information on how exponents effect local extrema
Although we lack the analytic methods to tackle local extrema properly there is some information we can gather just from the equation itself. Consider the following three graphs and notice what happens as we increase the degree of the leading term;
Each time we increase the exponent we get another ‘bend’ in the graph. But this need not always happen, after all the graph of doesn’t have the same number of bends as the graph of above. Nonetheless, we know that a parabola will always have one bend, and a line will never have any. Continuing this pattern we can eventually come to the following observation; the number of bends in the graph of a polynomial will be, at most, one less than the degree of the polynomial. This is important because each bend is also a local extrema, so a more precise (or mathematical) way to state our observation is;
For example, based on our lemma, if we have a fifth degree polynomial, we know that it will have at most four local extrema, even if we don’t know anything at all about what the graph actually looks like.
