Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2025/iii/paper-125/3/d/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2025 iii Paper 125 3 d Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
Writing , , and turns the cubic into . The birational coordinatesgive the Weierstrass equationThe original projective cubic has no common zero of its three partial derivatives modulo any , so it is already a smooth proper model and has good reduction at every such prime.
If , then , all nine inflection points are rational, and contains , so it is not cyclic. If , cubing is a bijection on . Counting on the Fermat model gives . A finite elliptic-curve group has the form with and , so . For odd , the equation has exactly one root because cubing is bijective, so there is only one nonzero rational 2-torsion point and . Hence the group is cyclic. For it has order three and is cyclic as well.
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