Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2021/paper-1/3/a/solution

For a fixed source point , the Green function is defined by
where is the Dirac delta distribution and the operator acts on . The corresponding solution is
Applying under the integral gives by the defining delta identity, while the endpoint values vanish. With the stated continuous coefficients, one may define the normalized distributional equation ; this avoids multiplying a general distributional second derivative by a merely continuous coefficient.
Existence of this inverse Green function additionally requires that the homogeneous two-point boundary value problem have only the zero solution. The assumptions printed in the question alone do not ensure this: on has the nonzero zero-endpoint solution . At such resonance there are solvability conditions and no ordinary inverse kernel for arbitrary . The construction below is nonresonant.

New to topics? Read the docs here!