Caratheodory boundary extension theorem Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
For a bounded simply connected domain and a conformal bijection , extends continuously to the closed disc if and only if is a locally connected space. A Jordan boundary gives a homeomorphism of closed discs, but local connectedness alone need not give injectivity on the boundary: a slit has two boundary approaches. The same statement applies on the sphere to unbounded domains after a suitable change of coordinates. This boundary theorem is different from the Caratheodory extension theorem for measures.
Locally path-connected space Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Every locally path-connected space is a locally connected space, but the converse can fail.
A space is locally path-connected when every point has a neighbourhood basis of path-connected open sets. Its path components are open.
Put on . This is a harmonic function, tends to zero at infinity, and is bounded. To justify the boundary behavior without requiring a locally connected space as its boundary, let . Its expansion at infinity implies that bounded cannot have . If approaches a finite point of and had a subsequential limit inside , continuity of would force that point to lie inside , a contradiction. Thus boundary degeneration under a mapping-out function gives . Consequently extends continuously to the finite boundary with value .
Let be planar Brownian motion started at , and its Brownian exit time from . This time is finite almost surely: it is at most the first time the imaginary coordinate, a one-dimensional Brownian motion, hits zero. By the Itô formula, is a bounded martingale. The optional stopping theorem and dominated convergence theorem therefore give
Boundedness is important here: directly stopping the unbounded imaginary-coordinate martingale would require an unjustified uniform integrability assertion.
At , the Laurent series gives . Hence
The sign follows because the exit point lies on . This proves the Brownian representation of half-plane capacity.