Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2019 ii Paper 2 23F a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
Here “covering map” uses the course convention of a local homeomorphism; “regular” adds the evenly-covered product condition. The derivative of is , which never vanishes on the upper half-plane . The holomorphic inverse function theorem therefore makes a local biholomorphism and hence a covering map in this sense.
It is not regular. The point has only the preimage in , whereas for small positive has the two preimages with arguments and . Thus the fibre cardinality is not locally constant near , so no neighbourhood of has a preimage of the form for a fixed discrete set .