Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2017 / iii / Paper 201 / 3 / c / Solution

Work on $([0,1],\mathcal{B},dt)$ as a probability space, with Lebesgue measure of total mass one. Let ${\mathcal{F}}_n$ be the filtration generated by the level-$n$ half-open dyadic cells together with the separate null cell $\{1\}$. Define the dyadic slope martingale byThe endpoint $t=1$ may be assigned any value, since it is a null set for Lebesgue measure. The two child slopes average to their parent slope, by telescoping the two increments. Therefore $\mathbb{E}[G_{n+1}\mid {\mathcal{F}}_n]=G_n$ almost everywhere, so this is a martingale. The Lipschitz condition gives $|G_n|\le K$ everywhere except possibly at the freely chosen endpoint, where we take zero.

Apply the Lp martingale convergence theorem with $p=2$. Its limit $g$ has $|g|\le K$ almost everywhere and $G_n\to g$ in L1 norm as well, by Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. Choose a measurable representative of $g$ and set it to zero on any exceptional null set; it is then a bounded measurable function on the entire interval.

Set $f_n(x)=f(0)+{\int }_0^x{G}_n(t)dt$. Telescoping at the grid points shows that $f_n$ is the linear interpolation of $f$ on the dyadic grid. The Lipschitz condition gives $\Vert f_n-f{\Vert }_{\infty }\le K{2}^{-n}\to 0$. AlsoThe two uniform limits coincide, giving the absolutely continuous function representationThe chosen bound holds for every $t$ after the null-set modification; the integral identity holds for every $x$ simultaneously.