Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 2 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2003 / Paper 2 / 6 / b / Solution

The Cartesian tensor law is $T_{ik}^{\prime }=Q_{ia}{Q}_{kb}{T}_{ab}$. In every complete tensor contraction, summation over a transformed index contracts a pair of $Q$ factors to a Kronecker delta. In detail,Thus all three are invariant under rotations. They are $\mathrm{tr}T$, $\mathrm{tr}(T^2)$ and $\mathrm{tr}(T^3)$. For a real symmetric tensor, orthogonal diagonalization givesExpanding ${\prod }_i(\lambda -{\lambda }_i)$ and using Newton's identities to recover the characteristic polynomial from traces of powers yieldsComparison identifies $\boxed{c_2=-1,c_1=\frac{1}{2},c_0=-\frac{1}{6}}$.