Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2017 / iii / Paper 105 / 1 / 2 / a / Solution

Write the order-$m$ principal symbol as $p_m(x,y;\xi ,\eta )={\sum }_{|\alpha |=m}{a}_{\alpha }(x,y){\xi }^{{\alpha }_1}{\eta }^{{\alpha }_2}$. The conormal of the plane is $(1,0)$. Therefore the non-characteristic hypersurface hypothesis is exactlyIn particular its value at the origin is nonzero, and continuity provides a uniform positive lower bound for its modulus in a sufficiently small neighborhood. No lower-order coefficient enters this condition.