Centerville is the headquarters of Greedy Cablevision Inc. The
cable company is about to expand service to two nearby towns,
Springfield and Shelbyville. There needs to be cable connecting
Centerville to both towns.
Centerville is located at
(8,0) in the xy-plane, Springfield is at (0,5), and
Shelbyville is at (0,-5). To save on the cost of
cable, Greedy Cablevision wants to arrange the cable in a Y-shaped configuation,
running cable from Centerville to some point (x,0) on the x-axis where it then
splits into two branches, one going to
Springfield and one to Shelbyville.
Find the location (x,0) that will minimize the amount of cable between the 3 towns and
compute the amount of cable needed. Justify your conclusion by answering
the following questions.
(a) To solve this problem we need to minimize the following function of x:
(b) We find that has a critical point at
.
(c) To verify that has a minimum at this critical point we evaluate
the second derivative at this point.
critical point is , a positive number.
(d) Thus the minimum length of cable needed is .
You can earn partial credit on this problem.