Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2026 iii Paper 131 1 a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
For a connected Riemannian manifold , its Riemannian distance iswhere the infimum is over the piecewise smooth curves from to . Connectedness of a smooth manifold implies path connectedness, so this set of curves is nonempty.
The Gauss lemma says that the differential of preserves the radial inner product: for ,Consequently radial geodesics from are orthogonal to the images of tangent vectors to spheres centred at the origin in . In a sufficiently small normal neighbourhood of , this impliesevery competing curve has length at least the total variation of its radial coordinate, and the radial geodesic has that length.
The axioms , symmetry, and the triangle inequality follow directly from length and concatenation. Certainly . If , choose a normal ball that does not contain . Every curve from to first meets its boundary, and its initial part has length at least by the Gauss lemma. Hence . Thus if and only if .
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2026 iii Paper 201 2 c Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
For every , the exponential Markov bound and independence giveTaking the infimum over yieldsFor , convexity makes this supremum equal to , proving the upper bound in the stated tail form of Cramér theorem.