Use the extended-value convention for a normal family, which is essential here: every sequence in the holomorphic family has a subsequence converging uniformly on compact subsets either to a finite holomorphic function or to infinity. Convergence to infinity means for every compact . Equivalently one uses local uniform convergence in the chordal metric. For holomorphic functions a nonconstant meromorphic limit cannot acquire a pole: near a supposed pole, the reciprocals of sufficiently large-index functions are holomorphic and nowhere zero, and converge to a holomorphic function with a zero. Hurwitz's theorem would force that reciprocal limit to vanish identically, giving the constant infinite limit instead.
Restriction proves that global normality implies normality near each point. For the converse, choose a countable cover by connected discs on which the family is normal, with smaller discs covering and having compact closure inside the corresponding . Such a cover exists from the countable rational-disc basis and local normality. Starting with any sequence, extract a subsequence converging on , then a further subsequence converging on , and so on. The diagonal sequence converges on each . On an overlap the limits agree; a finite holomorphic limit and infinity cannot both occur there. The overlap graph of this cover is connected, since otherwise its components would partition the connected domain into disjoint open subsets. Therefore all local limits are of the same type and patch to one holomorphic function or to infinity throughout . Every compact set has a finite cover by the smaller discs, so convergence on their compact closures gives uniform convergence on that compact set. This proves that normality is a local property.
For the counterexample take the unit disc and the family . Since , tends uniformly to infinity. Any sequence from this family either has a constant subsequence or has indices tending to infinity, so the family is normal. Its derivatives are . No subsequence of these derivatives can have a finite locally uniform limit, because their values at any fixed nonzero point grow without bound; nor can they tend locally uniformly to infinity, since every derivative vanishes at zero. Thus a holomorphic normal family need not have a normal derivative family.
Now impose the point bound at . For any sequence of derivatives choose corresponding functions from the original family. Normality supplies a locally uniformly convergent subsequence, and the point bound excludes the infinite limit. Let its finite holomorphic limit be . The Cauchy integral formula gives convergence of derivatives uniformly on compact subsets. Explicitly, for compact choose so its closed -neighborhood lies in a compact ; then
Every sequence of derivatives therefore has a locally uniform subsequential limit. This pointwise anchoring of a holomorphic normal family proves the derivative family is normal under the stated bound.
For a plane domain, the following are equivalent descriptions of a simply connected domain: every based loop contracts in the domain with its basepoint fixed; any two paths with the same endpoints are homotopic while those endpoints stay fixed; its complement in the Riemann sphere is connected; every holomorphic function has a single-valued primitive; and every nowhere-zero holomorphic function has a holomorphic logarithm. The complement must be taken in the extended plane, including infinity. An equivalent winding number formulation is that every closed curve has index zero about every point outside the domain.
Here is a direct equivalence proof for the first two topological formulations. If all paths with given endpoints are homotopic relative to those endpoints, apply this to a loop based at and the constant path at , obtaining a contraction. Conversely, let join to . The loop contracts with basepoint fixed. Concatenating this contraction with produces a homotopy from to , relative to . The middle retracing excursion contracts by shortening its traversal in both directions, giving a homotopy from that first path to . Hence and are homotopic relative to their endpoints. Planar domains are path-connected, so no extra path-component condition is needed.
The analytic descriptions follow from path independence of the holomorphic integral. Local primitives exist on discs by integrating power series; a homotopy can be subdivided into pieces lying in such discs, and local path integrals cancel along its common edges. Thus integrals over homotopic paths agree, giving a global primitive. Applied to for a nowhere-zero function, a primitive makes constant and hence supplies a holomorphic logarithm. These observations are also the tools used in the mapping proof below.
The Riemann mapping theorem states that every nonempty simply connected proper domain admits a conformal bijection onto the unit disc. Given , there is exactly one such map with and . The exclusion of the whole plane is necessary: an entire map into the disc would be constant by Liouville's theorem.
An extremal proof has the following concrete steps. First construct an injective bounded holomorphic map. Choose and a holomorphic square root of . It is injective, since equality of its values implies equality of their squares. Its image is disjoint from its negative: would imply and then , impossible. If , choose with ; the disc is omitted. Therefore is injective and bounded. Scaling it and applying an automorphism of the unit disk gives a map into the disc taking to zero; a rotation makes its derivative positive.
Let consist of all injective maps with this normalization. It is nonempty. The derivative at is bounded above by the Cauchy integral formula on a small disc compactly contained in . Choose with derivatives tending to their positive supremum . Boundedness, the Cauchy estimates and a diagonal Arzelà-Ascoli theorem argument give a subsequence converging locally uniformly to ; this is the bounded-family form of the Montel theorem. Then , , and the maximum modulus principle puts its image in the open disc. The limit is injective: if distinct had , apply Hurwitz's theorem near to , which has no zero there; the limit would vanish identically, contradicting .
Finally suppose is omitted by . It is nonzero since . Let and choose a holomorphic square root of . It is injective and takes values in the disc. Put , so , and normalize by a rotation. The new map's derivative magnitude at is
This square-root improvement of a normalized conformal map contradicts extremality. Thus is onto. Two normalized bijections differ by a disc automorphism fixing zero; Schwarz lemma applied to it and its inverse makes it a rotation, and positivity of the normalized derivatives forces that rotation to be the identity. This completes the requested proof outline.
Take . In polar coordinates its Laplacian is , so it is harmonic on the annulus. If for a single-valued holomorphic function, the Cauchy-Riemann equations would give . But for ,
The first equality follows by evaluating the primitive around a closed curve. This contradiction verifies the absence of a global harmonic conjugate.
For the final function, the quotient of squared distances is . On , both and lie in the open right half-plane, so their principal logarithms are single-valued and holomorphic. Define
The series converges locally uniformly outside the unit circle, and
Thus this is the required single-valued holomorphic function, even on the larger domain . Its derivative is , whose two periods around the holes cancel. The logarithmic cancellation on an exterior annulus explains why this example succeeds while fails; using independent multivalued logarithms of and would conceal that cancellation.
An explicit disk map of a slit half disk makes the two boundary approaches visible without assuming an extension theorem for the boundary. We construct the map as a succession of bijections and then determine its limits.
First maps the upper half-disc of radius two bijectively onto slit along . Indeed, its inverse chooses the square root whose argument lies in . The removed segment on the imaginary axis becomes , so the image of is precisely
The Möbius transformation maps the radius-four disc bijectively onto the unit disc, taking to zero and to one. This follows also by writing it as , an automorphism of the unit disk after the scaling. It takes the removed real interval to , so the image is the unit disc with this radial slit removed. Choosing defines a single-valued square root and maps that slit disc bijectively onto
All these maps have nonzero derivatives on their respective domains, since their potentially problematic zero or branch point is on the removed slit.
Next the Joukowski map is a conformal bijection from onto the lower half-plane. For ,
If , then , and rules out the second factor vanishing. To prove surjectivity, take in the lower half-plane and consider . Neither root lies on the unit circle, where is real. Their product is one, so exactly one has modulus less than one. For that root the displayed imaginary-part identity forces . Thus it lies in . Also cannot vanish there. Finally maps the lower half-plane bijectively onto the unit disc: the inequality is exactly , and its inverse is . Consequently
is a conformal bijection of onto the disc.
At the slit point the continuous rational expression for tends to . In a sufficiently small neighborhood of , points of have nonzero real part. Since and the real-coefficient Möbius map preserves the sign of the imaginary part, right-side approach gives , while left-side approach gives . Hence
The two limits of are therefore
They have modulus one and are distinct, since and the Möbius map is injective on the extended real line. The two-sided cluster set at an interior slit point is a geometric consequence of opening the slit into two boundary intervals.
Figure 1.
Two sides of the slit at i/2 become distinct boundary points after squaring, a disk automorphism and a square root
. Details.
For the given map , the composition is an automorphism of the unit disk. To see its precise boundary behavior, let and compose with the inverse of . This gives a disc automorphism fixing zero. Applying Schwarz lemma to it and its inverse shows it is a rotation. Thus
Its denominator never vanishes on the closed disc, and its inverse has the same property; it therefore extends to a continuous bijection of the unit circle. Put and . These are distinct points of that circle, independent of the approaching sequence.
For any sequence approaching , every infinite right-side subsequence has image tending to , and every infinite left-side subsequence has image tending to . At least one side occurs infinitely often. Conversely, any convergent image subsequence has a further subsequence confined to one side, so its limit must be the corresponding one of these two points. The cluster set is therefore exactly , or , according to which sides occur infinitely often. Both sides really occur in the domain, for example along with positive .
We first derive the exterior area theorem for univalent functions directly from Green's theorem, then obtain the coefficient bound needed for the Koebe quarter theorem.
Suppose is univalent on and has a Laurent series
For , the image of , , is a regular simple closed curve. By the Jordan curve theorem the curve has one bounded and one unbounded complementary component. The image of lies in the unbounded component, since it is connected, avoids the curve by injectivity and contains points near infinity. It fills that component: any finite boundary limit of the image has preimages bounded by , and a convergent preimage subsequence must land on or else give an interior image point. Thus no boundary of the image lies inside that complementary component. The curve is positively oriented about its bounded interior, since the exterior is on the right of and a holomorphic map with nonzero derivative preserves orientation. Green's formula gives its enclosed area as
For completeness, the positive Fourier mode is and the negative modes are . On multiplying by the conjugate series and integrating, all unequal-frequency products integrate to zero by Fourier orthogonality. The equal-frequency products give and , respectively; the constant term gives zero. The Laurent series and its differentiated series converge uniformly on the circle, since , so these operations are justified. Nonnegativity of yields . Letting , or first doing so for every finite partial sum, gives
No regularity of the map on the unit circle has been assumed.
Now let be a normalized univalent function. Its only zero is at zero, so , extended there by the value one, is holomorphic and nowhere zero. On the simply connected disc it has a holomorphic square root with value one at zero. Its odd square-root transform is
This is an odd function which is holomorphic and normalized. It is also univalent: gives and hence . If , oddness gives , so , forcing . Thus is univalent on the exterior disc, with expansion
Applying the area bound to its first negative coefficient proves the second coefficient bound for normalized univalent functions, .
Let be any point omitted by . It is nonzero. Postcomposition with a Möbius map gives another normalized univalent function
whose denominator does not vanish. Applying the second coefficient bound both to and to gives
Every omitted point therefore has modulus at least , proving
This establishes the Koebe quarter theorem from the allowed area formula.
Sharpness is witnessed by the Koebe function . It has the required value and derivative at zero. The equality simplifies to , and makes it injective. Moreover,
Thus is omitted, so no larger universal radius is possible. In fact shows its image is the plane slit along .
Without univalence take a real and
It is entire, with and , but it omits , a point of modulus less than , since the exponential never vanishes. It is genuinely not univalent on the disc: the distinct points lie there and both give exponential value . Even its derivative never vanishes, illustrating why local conformality alone does not give the quarter-disc inclusion.
At a critical point of a twice continuously differentiable real function, and the Taylor expansion is
The real symmetric Hessian matrix has an orthonormal eigenbasis, so writing gives . If every eigenvalue is positive, this quadratic form is at least , and the remainder cannot change its sign for sufficiently small nonzero . Thus is a strict local minimum. If every eigenvalue is negative, the analogous argument gives a strict local maximum. If positive and negative eigenvalues both occur, displacement along the corresponding eigenvectors gives values above and below , so is a saddle point of a scalar function.
The second-derivative test can be inconclusive when the Hessian matrix is singular and semidefinite: higher-order terms along directions in the kernel of a linear map matter. For example and have the same Hessian at zero, but the first has a strict minimum and the second a saddle point of a scalar function. A zero eigenvalue does not prevent a saddle conclusion if other eigenvalues already have both signs.
For the given function write . Its first derivatives are
The origin is a critical point for every real , with
Its eigenvalues are , so it is always a saddle point of a scalar function. If one coordinate at a critical point is zero, the other must also be zero. If both are nonzero, the derivative equations force , possible only for . Hence for the origin is the only critical point.
For there are four additional critical points,
At such a point,
Thus the two equal-sign points are strict maxima, and the two opposite-sign points are strict minima. They are global: implies
where the last maximum occurs at and equality also requires .
As , the four nonzero critical points have distance from the origin and escape to infinity, rather than merging with the origin. Their values diverge as . As from below there are no extra critical points, while the origin stays a saddle throughout. This is critical points escaping to infinity in a Gaussian-weighted bilinear function.
For a Riemannian metric , write . Use the energy of a curve normalization compatible with the requested inequality:
The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality here has the direct variance form
Equality holds exactly when is constant almost everywhere, hence everywhere for a smooth curve. With the alternative energy of a curve convention containing a factor , the same assertion reads .
In the upper half-plane write , , and use . Let the endpoints be , , . Then
The first equality requires throughout. Endpoint values force . The second equality requires the derivative of to have one sign, so is monotone. Conversely every smooth monotone positive with these endpoints attains this bound. Consequently the absolute length minimizers are precisely the vertical curves with monotone height, including a constant curve when , and the distance is .
For curves stationary for the energy of a curve, fixed-endpoint variations give the Euler–Lagrange equations for :
Thus for a constant . Since , integration gives , hence . The second equation then becomes . Therefore
It has constant hyperbolic speed, is one of the absolute length minimizers, and also has minimum energy of a curve .
Fixed endpoint variations yield the Euler–Lagrange equation
When is independent of , differentiation gives
This is the Beltrami identity. Denote the constant by when nonzero; for a general Lagrangian a zero constant is also possible.
The film area is . Suppressing its harmless positive factor , take . The Euler–Lagrange equation reduces to
The first integral is with . Hence and, using the differential equation without dividing by , . The positive solution obeying that first integral is . Equal endpoint radii force , giving
Thus every smooth positive stationary film in this axisymmetric class is a catenoid.
Put . The boundary equation is . The function tends to infinity at both endpoints of , and
Its minimum occurs when . The function is strictly increasing, with derivative , and has limits and . It therefore has exactly one positive zero . At this point , so . This proves the catenoid existence threshold for equal rings:
At equality there is one stationary solution and above it two. The equation describes candidates for an area minimum, not a guarantee that both branches minimize. The thinner-neck branch is unstable to suitable axisymmetric variations; topology-changing collapse can also compete with connected films. In particular two separate planar disks have area . The derived threshold concerns existence of the smooth annular stationary film; it does not exclude such disconnected competitors.
Use the causal Green function: it vanishes before the forcing time . For it solves the homogeneous equation, is continuous at with value zero, and has first-derivative jump one. These conditions give
Indeed the right derivative at the forcing time is one and the left derivative is zero, so distributionally. If , use the continuous limit on its causal support.
For , differentiating the integral solution gives
Both initial values vanish and . This verifies the requested representation and its sign. The formula similarly gives .
The intended dynamical assumption is steady inviscid Euler flow of constant density, with conservative body-force potential . Its equation is . The vector identity
then gives
With no body force take . Taking the scalar product with yields , so the Bernoulli function is constant along streamlines, though not necessarily the same constant on different streamlines.
Choose the planar streamfunction convention . Then with , and
If locally , comparison with gives
on the nonstagnant part of that flow. It extends to isolated stagnation points by continuity. Where the streamfunction is constant on an entire open region, cancellation of its zero gradient alone imposes no derivative condition on an arbitrarily extended .
Steadiness and incompressibility alone, without the inviscid dynamical assumption, do not imply the stated identity. In a steady Newtonian viscous flow the correct form has . For example, a pressure-driven planar Poiseuille flow has a nonzero streamwise pressure gradient balanced by viscosity, while has no streamwise component. This identifies the required qualification of the printed premise.