Parabolic sandwiches for functions on a compact interval and an application to projectile motion (Q2330276): Difference between revisions

Summary: About a century ago, the French artillery commandant Charbonnier envisioned an intriguing result on the trajectory of a projectile that is moving under the forces of gravity and air resistance. In 2000, \textit{C. W. Groetsch} [Am. Math. Mon. 107, No. 1, 15--23 (2000; Zbl 1004.70011)] discovered a significant gap in Charbonnier's work and provided a valid argument for a certain special case. The goal of the present article is to establish a rigorous new approach to the full result. For this, we develop a theory of those functions which can be sandwiched, in a natural way, by a pair of quadratic polynomials. It turns out that the convexity or concavity of the derivative plays a decisive role in this context.