Liouville’s theorem for harmonic functions

calculusharmonic functionsintegrationmultivariable-calculus

I was reading the proof of Liouville's theorem for harmonic functions (in $\mathbb{R}^n$) in Wikipedia, but I could not understand where do they use in that proof the assumption that $f$ is bounded.

The proof –

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Taken from – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_function

Best Answer

Jose's answer gives details of Nelson's original reasoning, but they aren't quite the same as the details in the proof on Wikipedia.

The crucial point in the latter is that we assume, without loss of generality, that $f$ is a nonnegative function (we can assume this because we assumed $f$ is bounded from above or below). Then nonnegativity is used in the first displayed inequality to say that an integral over $B_r(y)$ must be at least as large as the integral over $B_R(x)$, since the latter is a subset of the former.

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