The Divergence Theorem

I’ve been really busy with other projects — and work — of late, but I think we can get started again. We left off right after defining hypersurface integrals, which puts us in position to prove the divergence theorem.

So, let be a hypersurface with dimension in an -manifold , and let be a vector field on some region containing , so we can define the hypersurface integral

And if corresponds to a -form , we can write this as

where is the oriented volume form of and is a -form that “points perpendicular to” in . We take the given inner product and integrate it as a function against the volume form of itself.

A little juggling lets us rewrite:

where we take our -form and flip it around to the “perpendicular” form . Integrating this over involves projecting against , which is basically what the above formula connotes.

Now, let’s say that the surface is the boundary of some -dimensional submanifold of , and that it’s outward-oriented. That is, we can write . Then our hypersurface integral looks like

Next we’ll jump over to the other end and take the divergence and integrate it over the region . In terms of the -form , this looks like

But Stokes’ theorem tells us that

which tells us in our vector field notation that

This is the divergence — or Gauss’, or Gauss–Ostrogradsky — theorem, and it’s yet another special case of Stokes’ theorem.