How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
A continuous plane function with the local mean-value property is harmonic
Statement
Let be open, and let be continuous. If satisfies the local mean-value property of The circle and disc mean-value properties, then is harmonic on .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A continuous function with the local mean-value property.
The Poisson integral of continuous boundary data is the unique continuous harmonic extension to a closed disc (The Poisson integral gives the unique continuous harmonic extension on the closed unit disc).
Harmonic functions satisfy the mean-value property (Plane harmonic functions satisfy the mean-value property).
Proof
Fix a closed disc . By [L1], the boundary values have a unique continuous harmonic Poisson extension to , and [L2] makes satisfy the same mean-value property there. Put . Then is continuous on , has the local mean-value property on , and vanishes on the boundary circle.
By [L3], the closed disc is compact, so attains a maximum and a minimum on . If , then the boundary values being force the maximum to occur at some interior point . For a small circle centered at , the circle mean-value property gives as the average of values all bounded above by , so every value on that circle is also . Repeating this argument on overlapping small circles shows that the set is both open and closed in the connected disc, hence all of ; this contradicts the boundary value . Therefore .
Applying the same argument to gives , so and therefore on the closed disc. Together with step 2.1 this gives on , so there.
Since the closed disc was arbitrary and is harmonic on its interior, is harmonic on every point of , hence on all of .
Depends on
- The circle and disc mean-value properties
- The Poisson integral gives the unique continuous harmonic extension on the closed unit disc
- Plane harmonic functions satisfy the mean-value property
- Heine-Borel in $\mathbb{R}^n$: with the Euclidean metric a subset of $\mathbb{R}^n$ is compact if and only if it is closed and bounded, and the proof by bisection uses no choice principle; the same holds on the real line
Used by
Dependency tree · two levels
38 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- Jeremy Orloff, MIT 18.04 Topic 5: Introduction to Harmonic Functions (standard reference, not scraped)