Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-applied-complex-variables-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2011/1/a/i/solution
Past exam of the applied complex variables course of the University of Oxford 2011 1 a i Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-31
Put , so the interior angle at the th polygon vertex is . A conformal map straightens that corner by a power: locally,This follows by composing with the power that maps the corner to a half-plane and using Schwarz reflection along its straight edges. The reflected map has a nonzero first derivative in the straightened coordinates.
For an upper-half-plane branch of the complex logarithm, defineAlong each open interval of the real axis, has constant argument. Crossing from left to right decreases from to zero, so the argument of increases by . This is exactly the exterior turning angle of the polygon boundary. Thus has one constant boundary argument on all the intervals. The corner asymptotics remove its apparent singularity at each prevertex.
For a bounded polygon, the sum of exterior angles gives . Since every vertex has a finite prevertex, infinity maps to an ordinary point of an edge. In the local coordinate , Schwarz reflection gives with . Hence has a finite nonzero limit at infinity. After multiplication by one unit complex number, its boundary values are real. Reflecting across the real axis extends it to an entire function, including each removed prevertex, and it is bounded at infinity. Liouville's theorem makes it constant. Therefore the Schwarz-Christoffel formula isIntegration introduces one further additive constant.
The Möbius transformations preserving the upper half-plane have three real parameters:with common nonzero scaling irrelevant. They can send any cyclically ordered triple of boundary points to another such triple. Consequently three prevertices may be fixed independently; the other are constrained by the polygon's shape, through its side-length ratios. The constants of integration and multiplication account for translation, rotation and scale of the image, rather than further prevertex freedom.
If the last prevertex is infinity, use as its local coordinate. Its factor is absorbed into the overall normalization, leavingFor a finite image vertex at infinity's preimage, this has asymptotic order , because is of order . Thus the omitted factor is not evaluated by substituting infinity into the finite product; its angle is encoded by the behavior at infinity.
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