Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 ia Paper 4 11B Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
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 areSumming them and pairing the internal forces gives
About a fixed point , define the total angular momentum and external torque byDifferentiation produces no velocity term because . Grouping internal terms into pairs givesEach 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 givesTaking , the extra term is . Therefore the corresponding angular momentum about the centre of mass satisfiesIts 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 isThe common mass and common drag coefficient ensure that the same decay factor applies to every term.