Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2015 / iii / Paper 5 / 2 / 5 / Solution

The intended self-adjoint operator identity is $⟨Lf,g⟩=⟨f,Lg⟩$, with the inner product linear in its first argument. The printed second $Lf$ must be $Lg$. Taken literally, the printed identity forces $L=0$: put $g=0$ and then vary $g$. Its spectral conclusion is then trivial, but it does not define self-adjointness.

For the corrected identity, $⟨Lv,v⟩$ is real. If $\mathrm{Im}\lambda \ne 0$, the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality givesThus $L-\lambda I$ is injective and bounded below, so its range is closed: a convergent image sequence has a Cauchy sequence of preimages. Its range is dense because its orthogonal complement is $\ker (L-\bar{\lambda }I)$, also zero by the same lower bound. Hence it is surjective with inverse norm at most $1/|\mathrm{Im}\lambda |$. Therefore