Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2010/ia/paper-3/3c/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 ia Paper 3 3C Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Write . The first two components have no dependence, and the third component is zero. The only possibly nonzero component of the curl isThus wherever the field is defined.
The disk spanning lies away from the excluded axis: the distance from its center to that axis is . The field is continuously differentiable on a neighborhood of that disk. The Stokes theorem therefore givesThis value is independent of the choice of orientation.
For , take the counterclockwise orientation viewed from positive . Put , . Then , so the line integral isClockwise orientation gives ; no orientation is printed for this curve. There is no contradiction with the Stokes theorem: its usual spanning disk intersects the axis where the field is undefined, so the differentiability hypothesis fails. This is a curl-free vector field with nonzero circulation around the excluded axis; local angular potentials cannot be combined into a single-valued global potential.
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