Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2004 iii Paper 9 4 i Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
For a harmonic function , put . Its Wirtinger derivative isso the Cauchy-Riemann equations make holomorphic. In the simply connected domain it has a single-valued primitiveThe integral is path independent: local holomorphic primitives make its value invariant under path homotopies, and being simply connected makes any two paths with the given endpoints homotopic, as in Question 3.
Since , the real part satisfies and . Hence is constant on the connected domain. Adding a real constant corrects it, producing a single-valued holomorphic with . The imaginary part is a harmonic conjugate and is unique up to an additive real constant. This is the global harmonic conjugate criterion by vanishing periods in the simply connected case.