Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2019 ii Paper 3 21H c Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
For each , defineEvery is an entire function, hence continuous, so is closed. The hypothesis saysThe complex plane is a complete metric space. The Baire category theorem therefore implies that some has nonempty interior. Thus vanishes on an open set, and the identity theorem giveson all of . If , then ; otherwise the power series of has no term of degree or higher. Hence is a polynomial of degree at most . This is the pointwise vanishing derivative criterion for a polynomial.