6.

6 I The Theorems of Morera and Liouville and Extensions 241

6.6 THE THEOREMS OF MORERA
AND LIOUVILLE AND EXTENSIONS
In this section we investigate some of the qualitative properties of analytic and
harmonic functions. Our rst result shows that the existence of an antiderivative
for a continuous function is equivalent to the statement that the integral of f is
independent of the path of integration. This result is stated in a form that will
serve as a converse of the CauchyGoursat theorem.
Theorem 6.13 (Moreras theorem) Let f be a continuous function in a
simply connected domain D. If

C
f (z) dz = 0 for every closed contour C
in D, then f is analytic in D.
Proof We select a point z
0
in D and dene F (z) by
F (z) =

z
z0
f () d,
where the notation indicates the integral is taken on any contour that begins
at z
0
and ends at z. The function F (z) is well-dened because, if C
1
and
C
2
are two contours in Dboth with initial point z
0
and terminal point z
then C = C
1
C
2
is a closed contour in D, and by hypothesis,
0 =

C
f () d =

C1
f () d

C2
f () d.
Since f is continuous, we know that for any > 0 there exists a > 0 such
that |f () f (z)| < whenever | z| < . Now we can use the identical
steps to those in the proof of Theorem 6.8 to show that F

(z) = f (z). Hence
F (z) is analytic on D, and Corollary 6.2 implies that F

(z) and F

(z) are
also analytic. Therefore, f

(z) = F

(z) exists for all z in D, proving that
f (z) is analytic in D.