Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2003/paper-1/7/iii/solution

The field is smooth on the simply connected domain . Its curl is , so a necessary and sufficient condition for a conservative vector field is
At those values it is explicitly the gradient of . Equality of the two previous path integrals would impose only , which is weaker: coinciding path integrals need not imply a conservative field. For example makes those two integrals equal but leaves nonzero curl.

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