Inflection point of a plane cubic Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
An inflection point of a smooth plane cubic is a point where its tangent line has intersection multiplicity three. Once one inflection point is chosen as the identity, the nine geometric inflection points are exactly the 3-torsion points.
For over , each of gives the single affine point with . Including gives , so the Frobenius trace is . Therefore the Frobenius isogeny of an elliptic curve satisfies
On the -torsion, this reads . The element has order ten and . Hence
and no smaller positive power of is the identity on . A division field of an elliptic curve over a finite field has degree equal to the order of Frobenius on the torsion module, so