Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2007 ia Paper 3 8D Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Work on the Riemann sphere, including zero and infinity. For , two iterations give the identity and one does not, so . For , direct composition givesNeither nor is the identity; in particular . Thus
To prove the Möbius conjugacy normal forms, write a Möbius transformation as with . A finite fixed point satisfies . If , this quadratic has two roots counting multiplicity, and infinity is not fixed. If , the transformation is affine, infinity is fixed, and there is one further finite fixed point unless its slope is one. A nonidentity slope-one affine map is a nonzero translation with only infinity fixed. Thus any nonidentity Möbius transformation has one or two distinct fixed points.
If there are two, say , choose a Möbius transformation taking them to zero and infinity. For finite one can use ; the cases involving infinity use an affine map or reciprocal. The conjugate fixes zero and infinity. Fixing infinity sets its denominator's linear coefficient to zero, and fixing zero sets its numerator's constant term to zero; hence it is with .
If there is only one fixed point, send it to infinity. The conjugate has the affine form . If , would be another fixed point, which is impossible; therefore . Conjugating this translation by yields . The identity is already the scaling . This proves the classification, and invertibility excludes .
Conjugation carries fixed-point sets bijectively. The translation has exactly one fixed point, infinity. A nonidentity scaling has the two fixed points zero and infinity, while the identity fixes every point. Therefore is not conjugate to any scaling.
Finally let have finite positive order . A nonzero translation has infinite order, since its th iterate is after normalization. Thus is conjugate to , where has multiplicative order exactly . For , zero and infinity each form a singleton orbit. At a finite nonzero , an iterate returns precisely when , equivalently ; the least positive return time is . Conjugacy preserves orbit sizes. Hence the finite-order Möbius orbit sizes areFor exactly two points have size-one orbits; every other point has orbit size .