Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2009 iii Paper 21 3 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Over , take the projective cubicIn characteristic three its partial derivatives are , and . If they vanished simultaneously, and then . The equation of would force , impossible for a projective point. Thus the Jacobian criterion proves smoothness everywhere, including infinity.
It is an irreducible cubic: on the affine chart , the polynomial is , and is not a square in because its pole at infinity has odd order three. A quadratic in would factor over that field only if its right side were a square. Gauss lemma for polynomials then gives affine irreducibility, and homogenization introduces no factor at infinity because does not divide . This supplies the smooth plane cubic in characteristic three. In particular, choosing a Fermat cubic here would fail, because its cubic partial derivatives vanish in characteristic three.