Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2026 iii Paper 125 4 a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
The Kummer map of an elliptic curve gives an injectionBecause , the Galois action on is trivial, so a cocycle in the image is a continuous homomorphism . For and with , its kernel fixes the Kummer extension , which is Galois of degree at most and exponent dividing .
The local theory of reduction of an elliptic curve shows that these extensions are unramified outside the finite set consisting of primes dividing , primes of bad reduction, and archimedean places. Local fields have only finitely many extensions of any bounded degree. Together with the Hermite-Minkowski finiteness theorem, this implies that only finitely many global extensions of degree at most with these ramification restrictions occur. Each has only finitely many homomorphisms to the finite group . Hence the image of , and therefore , is finite.