Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2016/paper-2/5/b/solution

The inverse Fourier transform is
For , close in the upper half-plane, where decays. The single enclosed pole has residue , so counterclockwise integration gives . For , close clockwise in the lower half-plane; there is no enclosed pole and the result is zero. Thus
Here is the Heaviside step function. At the jump, symmetric Fourier inversion gives , the average of the one-sided limits. The transform itself cannot fix a function’s value at a single point, so this is the conventional representative rather than extra frequency information.
A direct check is . Distributionally, .

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