The nonzero quadratic residues modulo five are . The values of and the numbers of possible are
There are eight affine points and one point at infinity. Thus and part(ii) gives . The curve is nonsingular, since its short-Weierstrass discriminant is nonzero modulo five.
The dual operation reverses products, so . Also and . Squaring the latter identity gives
Therefore . Over the Frobenius is , of degree , so
More generally the Frobenius trace recurrence has , and ; the square calculation is its first nontrivial case.
Let . The stated characteristic equation for the Frobenius isogeny is
Take to be the complex roots of . They satisfy and . By the Hasse bound, . If the inequality is strict, the roots are complex conjugates and have squared modulus . In the equality case both roots are the same real number . Thus in every case
To obtain every extension-field count without assuming distinct roots, set and . The dual isogeny satisfies and . Consequently the sums satisfy
Alternatively, apply additivity of the trace of an elliptic-curve endomorphism directly to the characteristic equation multiplied by . The sequence has the same recurrence and initial values, so by induction. This is the Frobenius trace recurrence, valid also at a repeated root.
The fixed points of are , and is again separable. Since , the trace-degree identity gives
Factoring and using yields
This is the elliptic-curve point count over a finite field formula and the Riemann hypothesis for an elliptic curve over a finite field. In particular the powers on both factors are necessary; they are damaged in the converted TeX but present in the original PDF.