Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 iii Paper 28 6 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Under the path convention used here, a real Lévy process starts at zero, has independent increments and stationary increments, is stochastically continuous, and has càdlàg paths almost surely. We verify all four requirements for .
The immediate positive excursions proved in part (b) give . For a deterministic , is an almost-surely finite stopping time, and continuity gives . The Strong Markov property implies that is a fresh Brownian motion independent of the information up to . For ,No crossing of could have occurred before . The increment thus has the same law as and is independent of the past. Apply this successively at a finite increasing sequence of deterministic levels to prove stationary independent increments.
For and , part (b) and reflection giveHence in probability. Stationarity of the increments gives stochastic continuity at every level, from either side where defined.
For path regularity, on a single probability-one event the Brownian running maximum is continuous, nondecreasing and unbounded, andThis inverse is nondecreasing. If , then . For any , some has ; for all sufficiently large , , so . Thus , proving right continuity at every level simultaneously. On each bounded level interval it is bounded by the finite value at a larger integer level. Monotonicity then gives finite left limits. ThereforeThe Brownian first-passage subordinator is the level-indexed increasing process, rather than a process indexed by the original Brownian time.
For , the inverse relations for a continuous running maximum areFor example, if then ; while for , and any has . Taking limits gives . Similarly for , and a crossing of any level strictly above before a given bounds from above for sufficiently close to . This proves . These are the non-strict inverse of a continuous nondecreasing function identities.
At the random level in part (b), , so fails right continuity almost surely. Thus it is not a Lévy process under the stated càdlàg-path convention. It does have the same finite-dimensional distributions and stochastic continuity as , so definitions of a Lévy process that require only the increment and stochastic-continuity properties would call a Lévy process with a càdlàg modification. The reason for excluding the particular version here is its path regularity.