Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2017/iii/paper-309/4/b/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 309 4 b Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Put , , , , with primes denoting . The exterior derivatives are , , . For a Levi-Civita connection, the connection 1-forms obey both Cartan's first structure equation and metric compatibility. With lower indices , the result isAll other lower-index forms vanish or follow from . Raising the first time index changes its sign: for example , whereas and .
For direct verification, , and the same holds for index two. For indices zero and three each term wedges or with itself, so it is zero. These forms are metric-compatible, and uniqueness follows from the existence and uniqueness of the Levi-Civita connection. The printed uniqueness statement implicitly includes metric compatibility: the torsion equation alone permits adding nonzero forms with , since their wedge with vanishes.
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