Elliptic curve by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
An elliptic curve is defined by numbers and . The curve is the set of all points of the real plane that satisfy the Equation 1. "Definition of the elliptic curves"
Equation 1.
Definition of the elliptic curves
.
Figure 1.
Plots of real elliptic curves for various values of and
. Source.
Equation 1. "Definition of the elliptic curves" definies elliptic curves over any field, it doesn't have to the real numbers. Notably, the definition also works for finite fields, leading to elliptic curve over a finite fields, which are the ones used in Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman cyprotgraphy.
Bell test experiment by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Some of the most remarkable ones seem to be:
Biology experiments are hard, and so they go wrong, a lot.
For this reason, it is wise to verify that certain steps are correct whenever possible.
And so this is the first thing we did on the second day!
Gel electrophoresis separates molecules by their charge-to-mass ratio. It is one of those ultra common lab procedures!
This allows us to determine how long are the DNA fragments present in our solution.
Since we know that we amplified the 16S regions which we know the rough size of (there might be a bit of variability across species, but not that much), we were expecting to see a big band at that size.
And that is exactly what we saw!
First we had to prepare the gel, put the gel comb, and pipette the samples into wells present in the gel:
Figure 1.
Gel electrophoresis insert comb.
Source.
Figure 2.
Gel electrophoresis top view with wells visible.
Source.
Figure 3.
Gel electrophoresis pipette sample into wells.
Source.
To see the DNA, we added ethidium bromide to the samples, which is a substance that that both binds to DNA and is fluorescent.
Because it interacts heavily with DNA, ethidium bromide is a mutagen, and the biology people sure did treat the dedicated electrophoresis bench area with respect! Figure 4. "Gel electrophoresis dedicated bench area to prevent ethidium bromide contamination.".
Figure 4.
Gel electrophoresis dedicated bench area to prevent ethidium bromide contamination.
Source.
Figure 5.
Gel electrophoresis dedicated waste bin for centrifuge tubes and pipette tips contaminated with ethidium bromide.
Source.
The UV transilluminator we used to shoot UV light into the gel was the Fisher Scientific UVP LM-26E Benchtop 2UV Transilluminator. The fluorescent substance then emitted a light we can see.
As barely seen at Figure 8. "Fischer Scientific UVP LM-26E Benchtop 2UV Transilluminator illuminated gel." due to bad photo quality due to lack of light, there is one strong green line, which compared to the ladder matches our expected 16S length. What we saw it with the naked eyes was very clear however.
Figure 6.
Fischer Scientific UVP LM-26E Benchtop 2UV Transilluminator
. Source.
Figure 7.
Fischer Scientific UVP LM-26E Benchtop 2UV Transilluminator loading gel.
Source.
Figure 8.
Fischer Scientific UVP LM-26E Benchtop 2UV Transilluminator illuminated gel.
Source.
One major difference between the elliptic curve over a finite field or the elliptic curve over the rational numbers the elliptic curve over the real numbers is that not every possible generates a member of the curve.
This is because on the Equation "Definition of the elliptic curves" we see that given an , we calculate , which always produces an element .
But then we are not necessarily able to find an for the , because not all fields are not quadratically closed fields.
For example: with and , taking gives:
and therefore there is no that satisfies the equation. So is not on the curve if we consider this elliptic curve over the rational numbers.
That would also not belong to Elliptic curve over the finite field , because doing everything we have:
Therefore, there is no element such that or , i.e. and don't have a multiplicative inverse.
For the real numbers, it would work however, because the real numbers are a quadratically closed field, and .
For this reason, it is not necessarily trivial to determine the number of elements of an elliptic curve.
Edward Teller by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Witnessing the test explosion Edward Teller interview by Web of Stories (1996)
Source.
Video 2. . Source. Comissioned by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1979. Producer: Mario Balibreraa.
web.math.pmf.unizg.hr/~duje/tors/rankhist.html gives a list with Elkies (2006) on top with:
TODO why this non standard formulation?
This construction takes as input:and it produces an elliptic curve over a finite field of order as output.
The constructions is used in the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.
To do it, we just convert the coefficients and from the Equation "Definition of the elliptic curves" from rational numbers to elements of the finite field.
For example, suppose we have and we are using .
For the denominator , we just use the multiplicative inverse, e.g. supposing we have
where because , related: math.stackexchange.com/questions/1204034/elliptic-curve-reduction-modulo-p

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