Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2002/ia/paper-3/12a/c/solution

Assume is an interior point and choose small enough that its closed ball lies inside . Apply Green's second identity to the punctured region , where the potential is smooth and satisfies Laplace equation. Since , this gives
The crucial orientation is the outward unit normal vector of the punctured region: on the inner sphere, it is , pointing toward . Consequently and . The inner boundary term becomes
Writing and , its first part tends to by continuity. The second part is because the gradient of is bounded near , and hence tends to zero.
The omitted volume term also tends to zero: for bounded near , its absolute value is bounded by a constant times . Thus the limiting integral exists, and rearranging the outer boundary terms gives
This is Green's third identity for the Poisson equation with the stated sign convention. It retains both boundary terms; no homogeneous boundary condition has been assumed. The punctured-domain calculation accounts for the singular source without incorrectly applying the regular divergence theorem through .

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