Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 17 2 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
No: the round sphere supplies a counterexample. On the unit round , restrict the smooth one-formThe antipodal map satisfies , since is unchanged and changes sign. Every unit-speed closed geodesic is a great circle, with . Therefore its two half-circle integrals cancel:The same holds for all repeated traversals and either orientation.
However, its exterior derivative iswhich is not zero on the sphere. For example, at the tangent vectors and give . Hence is not a closed differential form, and cannot be an exact differential form, because . This is the counterexample to geodesic one-form injectivity on the round sphere; periodic geodesic integrals alone do not imply exactness without an additional geometric hypothesis.