Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2001 iii Paper 74 4 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Set and , with valuation rings . Let be the ramification index, the residue-field degree, and the residue characteristic. A base uniformizer generates in , up to a unit. The free -module has rank . For an integral , its field trace is the matrix trace of multiplication by on this module. Reduction modulo preserves the matrix trace.
The quotient has a filtrationEach of the successive quotients is a one-dimensional vector space over . On each, multiplication by acts as multiplication by its residue , whose trace over is . A basis adapted to the filtration makes the multiplication matrix block triangular, so its trace is the sum of these quotient traces. This proves trace reduction in a ramified local extension:Since the hypothesis says , the right side is zero in . ThusNo normality hypothesis is needed. The original PDF only requires divisibility of , not divisibility exactly once; the converted TeX has corrupted that condition and several local subscripts.