Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2010/iii/paper-5/5/b/solution

The strong maximum principle for subharmonic functions is: on a connected open domain, the canonical upper semicontinuous representative of a subharmonic function cannot attain a finite global maximum at an interior point unless it is constant. A local maximum instead forces constancy on an appropriate neighbourhood; it alone does not assert constancy on the whole domain unless that value is a global maximum.
Suppose on and . For every sufficiently small ball centred at , the subharmonic mean inequality gives
The nonnegative function has integral zero, so almost everywhere on that ball. Its canonical representative is then at every point of the ball, by taking still smaller local averages.
The maximum set is consequently open by the same argument at each of its points. It is closed relative to , because upper semicontinuity makes its complement open. It is nonempty, and connectedness gives . Therefore . This proves the principle, including its representative and connectedness hypotheses. Arbitrary representatives do not satisfy it: the function equal to zero almost everywhere but assigned value one at the origin has zero distributional Laplacian and an artificial pointwise maximum.

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