Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Minimum number of elements in a generating set of a group.

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 $x$ generates a member of the curve.

This is because on the Equation "Definition of the elliptic curves" we see that given an $x$, we calculate $x^3+ax+b$, which always produces an element $y^2$.

But then we are not necessarily able to find an $y$ for the $y^2$, because not all fields are not quadratically closed fields.

For example: with $a=1$ and $b=1$, taking $x=1$ gives:and therefore there is no $y\in \mathbb{Q}$ that satisfies the equation. So $x=1$ is not on the curve if we consider this elliptic curve over the rational numbers.

That $x$ would also not belong to Elliptic curve over the finite field ${\mathbb{F}}_4$, because doing everything $\mathrm{m}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{d}4$ we have:Therefore, there is no element $y\in {\mathbb{F}}_4$ such that $y\times y=2$ or $y\times y=3$, i.e. $2$ and $3$ don't have a multiplicative inverse.

For the real numbers, it would work however, because the real numbers are a quadratically closed field, and $\sqrt{3}\in \mathbb{R}$.

For this reason, it is not necessarily trivial to determine the number of elements of an elliptic curve.

The Equation "Definition of the elliptic curves" and definitions on elliptic curve point addition both hold directly.

The paper that states the BSD conjecture.

Likely paywalled at: www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/crll.1965.218.79/html. One illegal upload at: virtualmath1.stanford.edu/~conrad/BSDseminar/refs/BSDorigin.pdf.

Elliptic curve point addition is the group operation of an elliptic curve group, i.e. it is a function that takes two points of an elliptic curve as input, and returns a third point of the elliptic curve as its output, while obeying the group axioms.

The operation is defined e.g. at en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elliptic_curve_point_multiplication&oldid=1168754060#Point_operations. For example, consider the most common case for two different points different. If the two points are given in coordinates:then the addition is defined in the general case as:with some slightly different definitions for point doubling $P+P$ and the identity point.

This definition relies only on operations that we know how to do on arbitrary fields:and it therefore works for elliptic curves defined over any field.

Just remember that:means:and that $y^{-1}$ always exists because it is the inverse element, which is guaranteed to exist for multiplication due to the group axioms it obeys.

The group function is usually called elliptic curve point addition, and repeated addition as done for DHKE is called elliptic curve point multiplication.

Can be finite or infinite! TODO examples. But it is always a finitely generated group.

This construction takes as input:and it produces an elliptic curve over a finite field of order $p$ as output.

The constructions is used in the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

To do it, we just convert the coefficients $a$ and $b$ from the Equation "Definition of the elliptic curves" from rational numbers to elements of the finite field.

For example, suppose we have $a=3/4$ and we are using $p=11$.

For the denominator $4$, we just use the multiplicative inverse, e.g. supposing we havewhere $4^{-1}=3\mathrm{m}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{d}11$ because $4\times 3=1\mathrm{m}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{d}11$, related: math.stackexchange.com/questions/1204034/elliptic-curve-reduction-modulo-p