Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 9 1 iii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Put andFirst suppose . For an interior ball , with , write , , and . Constant shifts of a divergence-form elliptic operator change its forcing. The two nonnegative weak supersolutions and satisfy, respectively,Their Weak Harnack inequalities on therefore have forcing errors bounded by . Indeed , the new divergence forcing is bounded by , and the scalar forcing by ; also .
On we have . Even if , the elementary inequality impliesThe sum of the two essential infima is . Enlarging a uniform constant giveswhere . This is an oscillation decay estimate; inhomogeneous oscillation decay implies Hölder continuity. ChooseIterating on concentric balls, starting at a fixed admissible radius , yieldsThe strict choice of bounds the geometric series, including the case in which the two original decay rates coincide. Monotonicity of oscillation extends this bound to intermediate radii.
Take uniformly smaller than the distance of from the boundary of . The vanishing essential oscillation produces a continuous representative of . A ball centred at either of two sufficiently close points of contains both, so its oscillation bounds their difference by . For separated points use . Thus the Hölder seminorm satisfiesThe constants depend only on the indicated domain separation, dimension, coefficient norms, uniform ellipticity bounds and . If the global essential supremum is infinite, the displayed global estimate is vacuous; local boundedness of weak elliptic subsolutions on slightly larger compact subsets still makes the same argument prove interior Hölder continuity.