The ideal-form correspondence for imaginary quadratic fields and the reduction bound give exactly the forms , and . Thus the class number is three and the ideal class group is cyclic of order three.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2016 iii Paper 123 4 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
First compute the class number. The ideal-form correspondence for imaginary quadratic fields identifies the ideal classes with proper equivalence classes of primitive positive definite binary quadratic forms of discriminant . Each has a unique reduced positive definite binary quadratic form representative under the convention , with when or . From we get . Checking these three possible leading coefficients gives exactlyFor , neither odd residue choice makes integral. The listed forms are primitive and satisfy the reduction convention, soThis computes the ideal class group of Q of square root minus thirty-one.
Now take a root of , and let be its splitting field over . There is no rational root: the only candidates are , and neither vanishes. Thus the cubic is irreducible. Its polynomial discriminant isSince this is nonsquare, the Galois group of an irreducible cubic is . Its quadratic subfield is : the product of pairwise root differences squares to and changes sign under odd permutations. Thus is cyclic of degree three, and . Indeed the cubic field and have coprime degrees, so their compositum already has the full splitting-field degree six. The squarefree polynomial discriminant also shows, by the discriminant-index formula for an integral lattice, that is the full integer ring of the cubic field.
It remains to prove that is unramified everywhere. At any rational prime , the reduction of is separable. Over a finite residue extension in which it splits, all residue roots are simple and lift by Hensel lemma to the corresponding unramified extension of . Therefore the local splitting field is unramified over , and its extension over a completion of is unramified as well.
At the only possible ramified prime, direct reduction givesThe simple root lifts to . Write , with monic quadratic over . The discriminant product formula givesHere is a unit, so the quadratic discriminant has square class . Hence the entire local splitting field isIt is quadratic over , but its extension over the completion of is trivial. Thus the prime over splits completely in ; in particular it is not ramified there. This is the local splitting-field argument behind an unramified cyclic cubic extension from a prime-discriminant cubic. There are no real places of the imaginary quadratic field , so no infinite-place ramification remains to check.
The Hilbert class field theorem identifies the maximal everywhere unramified abelian extension with an extension of degree . Our cyclic unramified extension already has that degree, so it must be the whole Hilbert class field. ThereforeEquivalently, it is the splitting field of , of degree six over and degree three over . Replacing by gives the alternative defining cubic . This is the Hilbert class field of Q of square root minus thirty-one.