Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2014 ia Paper 2 2B Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-06
For continuously differentiable coefficients on a simply connected domain, the exactness condition is . Locally the same condition suffices without a global topological assumption. An exact first-order ordinary differential equation has a potential with and , so along a solution. Thus its implicit solution is . One local construction, on a rectangle about , isThe equality of cross derivatives verifies both required derivatives; on a simply connected domain one may use the corresponding path-independent integral of the exact differential form.