Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2024/paper-1/10/c/solution

Write the endpoint condition in its linear Robin boundary condition form . For a positive eigenvalue , the left Dirichlet boundary condition gives , and the right condition gives
For each positive root , the squared norm is
Consequently the sine coefficients in any complete expansion are
When , these are all modes and the Sturm-Liouville eigenfunction expansion gives exactly the stated sine series, with the usual convergence interpretation. Positivity of all eigenvalues follows from integration by parts and the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality:
for a nonzero admissible , since .
However, the original PDF states only , and with that range its sine-only completeness claim is false. The missing modes are as follows. At , admits , so the correct expansion is
For , a negative eigenvalue admits , with
There is exactly one positive root: decreases strictly from to zero. For example, its derivative has the sign of , because . Thus the corrected expansion is
These are the nonpositive modes in a Dirichlet-Robin interval expansion. As an explicit counterexample to the printed claim, at take : it satisfies both boundary conditions, and each positive root obeys
because . Thus all vanish despite . Likewise is a counterexample for , by orthogonality of Sturm-Liouville eigenfunctions with distinct eigenvalues. The formulas above give the full solution without silently assuming away the omitted modes.

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