Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2013/paper-2/3/i/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 2 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge 2013 Paper 2 3 i Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-18
Write . Away from the source, the radial Laplacian gives . Through a small source-centred sphere, the outward flux of its gradient isThis identifies a unit Dirac delta at the source. More explicitly, for a smooth compactly supported test function , apply Green's second identity outside the radius- ball. The inner outward normal of that punctured domain is . The term has integral , while tends to . Thus , proving the distributional identityWhenever the integral converges, convolution with this Green function of the Laplacian solves the Poisson equation for Newtonian gravity:The harmonic term represents the homogeneous freedom and is fixed by boundary conditions. For an isolated finite mass distribution, regularity away from the prescribed sources and the normalization at infinity select .
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