Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2025 iii Paper 125 3 d Solution 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.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2025 iii Paper 125 4 d Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
Take to contain every finite prime dividing and every prime of bad reduction of . The local theory of reduction of an elliptic curve shows that Kummer classes of rational points are unramified outside . Choose a basis of the constant group . Kummer theory and the Weil pairing identify the resulting two scalar coordinates ofwith power classes in . The ramification statement places both coordinates in . Restriction to is injective by the nondegeneracy proved in part b, and therefore
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2026 iii Paper 125 1 b Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
A Minimal Weierstrass equation for is a Weierstrass equation of an elliptic curve with coefficients in whose discriminant has minimum -adic valuation among all integral equations for related by admissible changes of variables.
Let and choose projective coordinates with and at least one coordinate a unit. Reducing the coordinates modulo givesMultiplying the primitive coordinates by a unit does not alter this point, so this defines the reduction map .
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.