Work in an inertial frame, take all masses to be constant, and assume the internal forces obey the pairwise relation from Newton's third law . For the angular momentum result, also assume these pair forces are central, so is parallel to and its pair torque vanishes. The equations from Newton's second law are
Summing them and pairing the internal forces gives
About a fixed point , define the total angular momentum and external torque by
Differentiation produces no velocity term because . Grouping internal terms into pairs gives
Each final cross product is zero by centrality, proving . Equal and opposite internal forces give momentum conservation when the total external force is zero, but do not in general make their internal torques cancel; the central-force assumption supplies that extra step.
Let and let the centre of mass be , so . For an arbitrary moving reference point , the same differentiation gives
Taking , the extra term is . Therefore the corresponding angular momentum about the centre of mass satisfies
Its definition using velocities relative to agrees with the one above, since makes . Thus this result remains true even when the centre of mass accelerates.
Finally take the common mass to be and , with constant . About either a fixed point or the centre of mass,
The angular-momentum equation becomes . Multiplying by the integrating factor gives , hence the angular momentum decay under uniform linear drag is
The common mass and common drag coefficient ensure that the same decay factor applies to every term.