Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2001 iii Paper 14 3 b i Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Use coordinates in which and write the defining cubic aswith homogeneous polynomials of degree two. Their restrictions , have no common zero: at such a zero all first partial derivatives of would vanish. The rational projection therefore extends to a morphism of algebraic varietiesIndeed, wherever , the surface equation gives , which remains regular on ; the analogous formula works wherever .
For the plane with , , its plane section is together with the residual plane conicThese residual plane conics are exactly the fibres of a morphism of , giving the conic bundle from a line on a smooth cubic surface. The family itself is smooth: off it is the graph of projection, and over the condition chooses the unique value .
Write with and symmetric. The degrees of its entries in areThus the conic discriminant is a homogeneous polynomial of degree five.
Smoothness also shows that every zero of is simple and has matrix rank two. To see the first point, at a rank-two singular fibre let span the kernel and use a local base coordinate . All fibre-coordinate derivatives vanish at , so smoothness of the total family requires . Since the adjugate matrix of a rank-two symmetric matrix is a nonzero scalar multiple of , the determinant derivative is nonzero. If the rank were at most one, the projective kernel would contain a line, on which the quadratic has a zero over the algebraically closed field; that point would be singular in the total family. This proves the reduced singular fibres of a smooth conic bundle assertion and also rules out vanishing identically.
The discriminant quintic of a cubic surface conic bundle consequently has five distinct zeros in . At each, a rank-two plane conic splits into two distinct projective lines . Neither equals : that would require to vanish identically, making proportional, contrary to their having no common zero. The original plane section is therefore , proving the required coplanarity and giving five distinct pairs.