Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2025 iii Paper 115 1 b Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
The de Rham cohomology isThe Poincare lemma says that every closed positive-degree differential form is locally exact, and is exact on every star-shaped open subset of Euclidean space.
Let and let be a closed one-form on . The hypothesis gives on . Choose a slightly larger coordinate ball around . The Poincare lemma gives on . The annulus is connected when , so there and is constant. Adjusting by this constant makes and agree on the overlap, and they glue to a global primitive of . Hence . For the claim fails: remove a closed proper interval from . Its complement is an interval and has vanishing first de Rham cohomology, whereas .
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2026 iii Paper 131 3 a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
An orientation selects the positive ordered bases in each tangent space. On an oriented -dimensional Riemannian manifold, the Riemannian volume form is the unique smooth -form satisfyingfor every positively oriented orthonormal frame. In positively oriented local coordinates,
The metric induces an inner product on the bundle of -forms. The Hodge star operator is the unique linear mapsuch thatfor all -forms . With the codifferential , the Laplace-Beltrami operator on differential forms is
The Hodge decomposition theorem says that on a compact oriented Riemannian manifold,an -orthogonal direct sum, where is the finite-dimensional space of harmonic -forms. Every de Rham cohomology class has exactly one harmonic representative.