Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2009 ii Paper 3 12F b Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
A compact set has exactly one unbounded complementary component, since its complement contains the outside of a sufficiently large disk. The connected, unbounded open set , being disjoint from , lies in that component. In particular belongs to the unbounded component.
Fill all bounded components of to obtain the polynomial hull . It is a compact set with connected complement, and . Therefore is holomorphic on a neighborhood of . The Runge approximation theorem gives polynomials converging uniformly to this function on , hence on . This proves the requested uniform polynomial approximation on , even when itself has holes. If is empty, the assertion is vacuous.